"Justice delayed is justice denied," the legal maxim holds, but what about justice dragged out and administered piecemeal, bureaucratized and monetized and extended well past the public's capacity to maintain its righteous anger? What about justice delayed so long that it is no longer demanded?

This summer will mark five years since Eric Garner died after a New York City police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, put him in a chokehold while attempting to arrest him for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. The strangling move was prohibited under NYPD rules. Garner was unarmed and begging for his life with a plea — "I can't breathe!" — that would become a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. The struggle that led to his death was caught on camera. The medical examiner's office ruled it a homicide and specifically cited Pantaleo's neck-compressing restraint as the cause of death.

And yet a grand jury declined to indict. Pantaleo faced no criminal charges. He was not fired, merely moved to desk duty, pulling a six-figure salary. The City of New York settled a civil suit with the Garner family, and taxpayers funded a $5.9 million payout. The Department of Justice launched an independent probe in December of 2014, but any conclusions it has reached have not been made public. Garner's daughter, Erica, died awaiting federal civil rights charges that have yet to materialize.

That just leaves the NYPD's departmental trial of Pantaleo, which began this week. About halfway through as of this writing, the hearings have included some damning moments. There was the medical examiner's testimony that Pantaleo's illicit chokehold "set into motion a lethal sequence," and the revelation that another NYPD officer declared, via text message, that Garner being "most likely DOA" was "not a big deal."

But despite these details — and despite the video, and the homicide ruling, and the departmental policy against chokeholds, and Garner's nonviolent offense, and his desperate appeals for mercy — despite all that, this trial is unlikely to end in anything like justice. It may well end with no discipline for Pantaleo at all.

"Eric is crying from heaven, because he sees his mother and his family out here still trying to fight for justice for him," said Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, as the hearings began. "It's been five years — five years we've been on the front lines trying to get justice, and they're still trying to sweep it under the rug."

She's right about the delay, but it's also true that five years after Garner's death, the "we" who have "been on the front lines trying to get justice" is not what it once was. The national uproar over police brutality that grew around Garner — and continued through the deaths of Ferguson's Michael Brown, Cleveland's Tamir Rice, Charleston's Walter Scott, Baltimore's Freddie Gray, Texas' Sandra Bland, and too many more — has largely quieted.

What was the last death to attract such broad attention? Was it the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile? My perception may be colored by living less than five miles from the spot where Castile died, but I can't think of a more recent addition to the grim pantheon of killings that inflamed and shaped the national conversation about policing in America. (The 2018 shooting of Dallas' Botham Jean was widely noted, but it did not spark the same interest in criminal justice reform because the officer who killed him was off-duty at the time.)

Castile was shot in July, almost two years to the day after Garner died — and almost four months to the day before the 2016 election. Less than two weeks after Castile's death, President Trump officially won his party's nomination. The country's attention shifted to debates and tweets, polls and emails. Our talk about law enforcement ceased to concern the local officers whose conduct might actually affect us and our neighbors and focused instead on the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and whether Trump or Hillary Clinton or any number of their associates ought to be locked up.

This is not because police violence has stopped happening. The Washington Post continues to dutifully tally the number of people American police fatally shoot each year, and yeah, the count so far stands at 342, probably enough to reach, by year's end, the last half-decade's annual average of about 1,000. I follow and write about police brutality and criminal justice reform topics more broadly with some regularity, but scrolling through the Post's list, I don't recognize a single recent name. The news stories cited for each entry are overwhelmingly from local sources; even deaths with inflammatory details like Garner's and Castile's no longer seem to gain much national traction.

Perhaps the media is due some blame, but I suspect the attention deficit here has more to do with demand than supply. Indignation about police misconduct and calls for reform were fading among the white majority by early 2016, as I wrote here at The Week at the time. Polling in late 2015 showed white Americans found police more trustworthy after 18 months of notorious police custody deaths and resultant protests. Already it was becoming evident that cases which once would (and should) have provoked national controversy were increasingly met with desensitization and indifference outside of local protests.

That's even more true three years later. Cases like Garner's are dismissed or, almost worse, investigated into a slow and silent oblivion. Settlements are paid, but little changes at the structural level. It's true that good and difficult work for local reform continues in many communities, but the larger momentum feels all but gone.

If Eric Garner were killed today, would many people outside his local community care? Would his story dominate headlines for more than a couple days? Would it be parsed more closely than the president's latest tweeted inanity?

And if it wouldn't, what does that say about us?

Did we only make time to object to police brutality when it was convenient? Was addressing systemic state violence that disproportionately affects minorities something we only bothered with when everything else seemed pretty copacetic? Was it always the political equivalent of a luxury good to be cut from our outrage budget as soon as times got tough?

If this departmental Garner trial comes to nought, will anybody march?

Vice President Mike Pence's commencement address at Liberty University this weekend was largely a predictable affair. But along with the platitudes and politicking came the part that made headlines, the part where Pence warned his audience they'd leave Liberty to live and work in a country that doesn't particularly like them:

[M]y message to all of you in the Class of 2019 is — derives of the moment that we're living in today. You know, throughout most of American history, it's been pretty easy to call yourself Christian. It didn't even occur to people that you might be shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible.

But things are different now. Some of the loudest voices for tolerance today have little tolerance for traditional Christian beliefs. So as you go about your daily life, just be ready. Because you're going to be asked not just to tolerate things that violate your faith; you're going to be asked to endorse them. You're going to be asked to bow down to the idols of the popular culture. [Vice President Pence via The White House]

This is the "evangelical persecution complex" in action. It may be sincere and well-intentioned — I don't know Pence’s heart, let alone those of ordinary American Christians who express similar views without the complicating factor of political gain — but it's misleading and misguided, damaging to real religious liberty issues and the plight of Christians suffering grave persecution abroad. Though I share Pence's concern that Christians prepare themselves for faithfulness in the face of cultural challenge, this fearmongering is not productive. It suggests an embarrassing ignorance of history and the teachings of Christ alike, and to those outside the church it unquestionably reads more as whining than witness.

Persecution has always been part of the story of the church. The New Testament reports the first martyrdom just a few years after the life of Christ, and after that, we're told, "a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem," scattering Christians into modern Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.

The earliest followers of Jesus were seen as a sect of Judaism, which enjoyed some exemptions from the requirements of Roman civil religion. But as Christianity grew and spread, it was quickly identified as a new religion, and those protections fell away. The waves of persecution that followed were not necessarily targeting Christians — the Decian persecution, for example, was an attempt to make Rome great again and only incidentally resulted in Christians' execution for refusing to worship idols and the emperor — but the effect was that many Christians were forced to flee, apostatize, or die.

The Emperor Constantine's embrace of Christianity and the subsequent rise of Christendom in Europe produced about a millennium of quiet for the bulk of the Christian world, though certainly persecution continued outside Europe. But the Protestant Reformation brought a fresh round of violence, this time of Christian against Christian — Catholics against Lutherans, Anglicans, and Reformed Christians (and vice versa), and everyone against Radical Reformers, like the Anabaptists. This, as any storybook account of the first Thanksgiving will tell you, is partly what drove European colonists to the Americas.

Protestants like Pence and most of his audience at Liberty (and me) tend to pay less attention to church history than our Catholic and Orthodox counterparts, but this record of persecution looms large in Christians' cultural memory across the board. In other words, it's not surprising that this is a lens through which we'd see our own experiences of opposition.

But that doesn't mean the antagonism American Christians are now experiencing should be placed in the same category, as Pence's remarks intimate. Yes, it was in some ways easier to be a Christian in the United States in decades past, but ridicule, hostility, and peer pressure to abandon the distinctives of Christian life are hardly new. (Jesus himself told his disciples to expect as much, commanding them to act in love.)

As a Mennonite who believes Jesus asks us to reject violence, power, and materialism — all deeply embedded in American culture — I'd argue things aren't so "different now" as Pence seems to think. It has never been especially easy to be a Christian in America if you think peacemaking is integral to our faith and domination and consumption are not. Every age poses new challenges to a faithful life, and "the moment that we're living in today" is nothing special in that regard.

If Pence's comments only ran afoul of history and Scripture, it would be bad enough. But they have more immediate, practical consequences, too. For Christians here in the United States, this sort of rhetoric has a "boy who cried wolf" effect where religious liberty issues are concerned.

If — while enjoying obvious political and cultural power, even as a holdover from an earlier era — we constantly cast ourselves as victims, it becomes difficult for non-Christians to take seriously real pleas for help in defense of freedom of conscience. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously eschewed the "vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted," and American Christians in an increasingly pluralistic society must learn to do the same for the sake of political strategy if nothing else.

As Alan Noble, co-founder of Christ and Pop Culture and a professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, wrote atThe Atlantic in 2014, we "need to be even more careful about the debates we choose to engage in, the rights we choose to assert, and the hills we choose to die on." A pattern of injudicious claims of victimhood undermine us when there is a real injustice to address.

Pence's words and the mindset that feeds them are arguably even more deleterious to Christians experiencing real persecution abroad. "Yesterday, I was informed by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that today Christians suffer more persecution around the world than any other religion," Pence said in his speech. "In fact, the United Kingdom released a report just last week that said persecution of Christians worldwide is 'near genocide levels.'" All of that is correct — an estimated "one in 12 Christians live where Christianity is 'illegal, forbidden, or punished'" — and the British report likewise found Christians to be the most persecuted religious group on Earth.

How can we Americans complain that we "might be shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible" while churches burn in Burkina Faso? It's important not to "bow down to the idols of the popular culture," but we're not being asked to bow on pain of literal death. As with our own religious liberty fights, threat inflation of the opposition the average American Christian will experience makes it easier to ignore or downplay this very real suffering abroad. We don't serve the persecuted church well if we drown out news of their deaths with our plaints about mean tweets — and Pence linked the one to the other in just a few sentences.

To be a Christian in the United States in 2019 may not be the all-time easiest context to practice our faith, but it is certainly near the top of the list. Christians in times past and elsewhere in the world today have lost their lives for their faith; we, at most, might lose a career, and even that is incredibly unlikely.

Contra Pence, it's still "pretty easy to call yourself Christian" in America. And if the days are evil, our task is not to deploy one of the most powerful men in the world to hyperbolize on our behalf at the largest private non-profit university in the country. It is to live wisely, make the most of the opportunities we do have, and give thanks.

Jesus was not born in a stable. That's not to say the birth wasn't attended by farm animals — the Gospel of Luke tells us twice the baby's first bed was a feeding trough — but rather that the animals lived in the house.

Peasant homes in first century Bethlehem were designed with what we would today call an "open concept." They typically had one large room with the nicer living space in an open loft or on the roof, while the main floor area was where the family's animals would be brought for safekeeping at night. The guestroom that was unavailable to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph was that loft or roof space, and the big room where they stayed instead served as the kitchen, living room, dining room, and farmyard all at once. The defining feature of Jesus' birthplace was not isolation, as we often tend to think, but an utter lack of privacy: Mary delivered in a crowded farmhouse with few, if any, interior walls.

And that was perfectly normal, if not exactly desirable, for our modern fixation on the open floor plan is a historical anomaly. It flies in the face of literally millennia of consensus that more rooms is better, and it is a dreadful mistake. The last 70 years of open concept construction and remodeling has left us with dysfunctional houses, homes that are less conducive to hospitality, less energy efficient, and more given to mess.

The shift from open concepts demanded by necessity to widespread construction of separate rooms to open concepts demanded by style is relatively recent. Before the 17th century, especially for the poor, "rooms did not have specialized functions," explains architect Witold Rybczynski in Home: A Short History of an Idea. "Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown."

A single room could serve as a study in the morning, a dining room at noon, a living room in the evening, and a bedroom at night. Beds were couches, and couches were beds. Your house was your workspace, and your minimal furniture typically had no fixed arrangement, as it was constantly moved about to accommodate different uses of the only room available. (The French and Italian words for "furniture" still hint at this history: You can see the similarity to "mobile" in meubles and mobilia.)

These open concepts of old were not only motivated by different conceptions of privacy and the expense of building additional walls. They were also required for the lower classes by premodern heating technologies. A single open hearth, or, later, fireplace or stove, could warm one large room but could not do much for other, closed-off spaces. A lord or king could build a heating element into every room, but for the average family, winter warmth required most of life to happen in a single space.

As technology advanced, ideas about privacy changed, and standards of living improved over the last 500 years, ordinary people were increasingly able to move away from an open concept home, and they eagerly did so. "Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves," notes Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Though the transition was slow — toilets long had "multiple seats, for ease of conversation" — rooms were increasingly devoted to particular uses, and those uses were separated from one another as much as resources permitted.

Vernacular homes dating to the 19th and early 20th centuries, of which the United States has many, were built with this background in mind. My own home, constructed in 1915, is fairly typical in this regard. The dining room joins to the living room with a wide archway, but the two spaces are clearly delineated. The kitchen was originally separated from the dining room by a solid door, and though some previous resident in the past century removed it, the rest of the wall dividing the two rooms is left intact.

Too many other historic houses have not fared so well, as taking down a kitchen wall seems to have become many remodelers' first and strongest impulse. New construction has favored wall-less layouts in the main living area for about 50 years, too. While the aesthetic effect is worse in older homes, old and new alike suffer from the many downsides of an open layout which prior generations jettisoned as soon as they could.

Though sold on HGTV as a boon to the entertaining lifestyle, the modern open concept in practice makes hospitality more difficult. A single cooking-dining-living space is difficult to keep clean to the standard many prefer when hosting guests, making impromptu invites tricky. "Messes and smells are no longer isolated, but can be easily tracked throughout the entire first floor of a large home," says architecture critic Kate Wagner at City Lab. Beyond the unpleasantness of having dirty dishes in sight during a dinner party, an open floor plan can make smaller gatherings awkward, failing to provide the sense of intimacy that fosters good conversation. Parties need walls to literally force people together.

And because we no longer heat our homes with a single hearth, wall-less layouts mean energy waste. Heat from the kitchen can't be easily confined in summer months, and climate control can't be isolated to the room you're actually using. The high ceilings and loft spaces popular in newer open concept houses are particularly bad in this regard. They also make DIY home maintenance, like painting and cleaning windows, substantially more difficult.

But perhaps the greatest problem with the modern open concept is that it simply doesn't work well for real life. Open concepts are loud and busy, requiring everyone in shared living spaces to accommodate each other's activities or vacate the area to get a little peace. In the name of togetherness and ease, they make for more annoyance, work, and expense.

Our ancestors had this one right: If you can have separate rooms, do it. And if your historic home still has an enclosed kitchen, for goodness' sake, keep it that way.

The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment proceedings against then-President Bill Clinton that followed are the first major news events to loom large in my memory.

I was too young to understand much. I didn't know what the president had done with his intern, why anyone cared about the blue dress, or how impeachment worked. And in retrospect, there were plenty of other big stories I could have more easily noticed: O.J. Simpson's trial, perhaps, or Waco, or maybe even the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it is this scandal which sticks out, and it isn't difficult to divine why. I grew up evangelical, and we were Very Upset.

These days it seems everyone is Very Upset all the time. Evangelicals are no exception, but, as has been endlessly observed over the last three years, white evangelicals overwhelmingly find themselves defending a scandalous president instead of deploring him. This week, that defense came to include an American Family Association (AFA) petition against National Review's David French for the crime of having a moral memory longer than that of a goldfish.

French's offense, in the AFA's telling, is the "yellow journalism" and "character assassination" of crying foul on selective partisan outrage. In a late April column, French detailed the inconsistent record of ethical commentary from evangelical leader Franklin Graham (son of the late Billy Graham) where Presidents Clinton and Trump are concerned.

Evangelicals should "should pray for presidents, critique them when they're wrong, praise them when they're right, and never, ever impose partisan double standards," French concluded. "We can't ever forget the importance of character, the necessity of our own integrity, and the power of the prophetic witness."

Two decades ago, that would have been extremely standard stuff for an evangelical writer or organization. In the 1990s, politically conservative Christians' engagement with politics focused substantially on character. It was appropriate, they said, to consider the moral failings of public figures like Clinton at least as seriously as their policy aims and accomplishments. "We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system," said one 1998 statement signed by prominent evangelical theologians. "We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused so long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy."

I'm not sure my family or church ever came across that particular document, but its sentiments are entirely familiar. We talked about character ad nauseam. How could a man who couldn't keep his promises to his wife keep his promises to the country? Even if a given politician were your political dream candidate, we reasoned, you'd be bound for disappointment were his integrity lacking.

I still think that's true. Yet now, as French argued and the AFA's pantomime petition illustrates (with 47,000 signatories and counting as of this writing), for many pro-Trump evangelicals, personal character is measured on a weighted scale. "Certainly, no one would agree that President Trump's past is a perfect model of morality," the petition allows with bracing understatement before insisting that, since becoming president, Trump "has come nowhere near the glaring moral indecencies of Clinton while he served in office." French handily dispatches this claim, but he can hardly excise the bitter root of pretense that feeds it.

That is something pro-Trump evangelicals must do themselves, and something I hope, as a fellow Christian — albeit one with some substantial theological and political differences from the context in which I was raised — they will do. This is not an expectation that white evangelicals will drop their commitment to Trump. I admit to believing there are many reasons they should, but what I'm making here is a lesser ask: Just be honest about what motivates that allegiance. Be honest that it's about politics, not God.

Some Trumpvangelicals have dabbled in this honesty. "If that were the only thing the electorate cared about — which one's more moral? — I'd go with Ted [Cruz]. But Donald has the skill set we're looking for," said one evangelical in 2016. "So yeah, we'll put our blinders on." Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. has similarly expressed literally unshakeable loyalty to Trump on grounds of policy, questions of principle and personal behavior be damned.

But too often this honesty only goes so far. Moments before declaring "you don't choose a president based on how [personally] good they are," for example, Falwell announced Jesus' supposed endorsement of his candidate selection metric. Moments after, he declared it "may be immoral ... not to support" Trump because of what he "did for the poor."

Backing Trump on political grounds with total disregard for moral character is not, to my mind, defensible, yet it at least has a certain internal coherence. But backing him (or any politician) with total disregard for moral character while minimizing his immorality per a partisan double standard — well, that's a step far beyond utilitarian politicking. It's hypocrisy, and everyone can see it.

So please, evangelical Trump supporters, be honest. If you don't care about politicians' character anymore because you've realized such apathy is politically useful, admit that and apply your disinterest in character consistently across the political spectrum.

Don't drape your commitment to Trump in the sort of blatantly absurd moral charade this AFA petition represents. Don't claim the moral high ground while championing a leader who "just about runs the table on the seven deadly sins." Don't put a facade of faithfulness over what is quite clearly a foundation of expedience.

In the spring of 2008, former Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna was in Iraq, where he and his platoon were charged with transporting for release a suspect named Ali Mansur Mohamed. Military intelligence thought Mansur was linked to a recent IED attack which killed two American soldiers, but, lacking evidence to tie him to terrorism after days of questioning, they had to let him go.

Behenna did not find that satisfactory, and his platoon stopped at a bridge for some questioning of their own. With another soldier, Behenna blindfolded Mansur and cut off all his clothes with a knife. They removed his handcuffs. Then Behenna shot him twice, before allegedly ordering the other soldier to use a grenade to disfigure his body. Though he'd claim to have acted in self-defense, Behenna was court-martialed and convicted of unpremeditated murder in a combat zone. He was initially sentenced to 25 years in prison but served only five. He was released on parole in 2014 and, on Monday, granted a full pardon by President Trump.

Legally, Trump is on steady ground here. The Constitution accords the president expansive pardon powers, which is a boon where victimless drug war offenses are concerned. But what Behenna did was far from victimless, and whether Trump can grant him clemency is a very different question from whether he should. This pardon is a knowing wink at war crimes, and, especially in broader context of the Trump administration's callous approach to civilian casualties, sends an alarming message about what U.S. troops may do in battle.

This is not to suggest intolerable levels of civilian deaths in America's several wars began when Trump took office. The Obama administration's drone warfare was particularly egregious, to cite a recent example, and its accountability measures were inadequate to the point of being deceptive. But since the campaign trail, Trump has expressed a consistent disregard for harm to innocent people — in 2015 he recommended the deliberate murder of the wives and children of terror suspects — and he has carried that ethic into office with insidious effect.

Exhibit A is surely Trump's stubborn enablement of Saudi war crimes in Yemen, an Obama-era project he preserved this spring in the face of a rare congressional display of conscience. The U.S.-supported, Saudi-led coalition intervening in Yemen's civil war is responsible for airstrikes on civilians at hospitals, funerals, weddings, schools, markets, refugee camps, and residential neighborhoods. Thousands of Yemeni innocents have died in bombings the United States has facilitated; tens of thousands of Yemeni children have died of starvation and preventable diseases; more than half of Yemen's 28 million people are at risk of famine and a raging cholera epidemic — and in all of this the Trump administration is complicit.

But Yemen is hardly the only victim of Trump's stance on civilian protections. His administration has loosened rules governing U.S. airstrikes, including drone attacks, "against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities." Gone as well are the already insufficient reporting requirements of the Obama years. Our drone war is geographically boundless and disconnected from U.S. security, with strikes permitted against low-level suspects who demonstrate no "continuing, imminent threat" to us. And if — realistically, when — innocents are killed, their wrongful deaths may not even be counted.

Within areas of active hostilities, too, civilian casualties are on the rise, hitting record levels in Afghanistan in 2018 in part because of "a relaxation of the rules of engagement for airstrikes by United States forces in Afghanistan at the end of 2017." The Trump administration has also vigorously rejected international accountability efforts for the actions of Americans in Afghanistan, with National Security Adviser John Bolton in September lambasting a proposed International Criminal Court investigation into evidence that "U.S. armed forces and CIA personnel subjected individuals being interrogated for information to the war crimes of torture, cruel treatment, and outrages on personal dignity," including "some instances of rape by CIA personnel."

It is against this backdrop that Trump's pardon for Behenna arrives. According to military court filings, Behenna threatened Mansur's death — "This is your last chance to tell the information or you will die," he told the naked, unarmed man shortly before killing him — and afterwards informed members of his platoon he did not regret the murder and "would do it again." Now Behenna's record is wiped clean, and other U.S troops convicted of battlefield crimes are already seeking the same lenience.

Trump's inhumane and irresponsible jus in bello policy is reprehensible enough, at odds with the longstanding American values and laws the president and U.S. soldiers alike have sworn to uphold. This pardon suggests even gross violations of those loosened rules may be indulged. It is a dismissal of the gravity of war crimes, if not an outright endorsement of them. It is not so much mercy as an invitation to future injustice and abuse.

President Trump's signature ballad, "No Collusion No Obstruction (Fake News Witch Hunt)," gained a new verse this weekend. Inspired by a tweet from Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., Trump announced to the world late Saturday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation has "stolen two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back." His retweet of Falwell's comment, posted the night before, proposed adding two years to his first presidential term "as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup."

Though they prompted some jitters, these tweets strike me as a joke — albeit a very bad one with a subject that should always be off-limits for a sitting president. (Trump is so visibly eager to lay into 2020 Democrats that I doubt his bullying urges would tolerate an election delay.) But even if they shouldn't be taken literally, these comments about "stolen" time are revealing, because the only sort of time the Russia probe has taken from Trump's presidency is press time.

It's not as if Mueller or his team required a significant portion of the president's actual working hours. Trump never gave an in-person interview to the investigation, and by Trump's own account Mueller never spoke with "the people who were closest to me, by far, and knew the Campaign better than anyone." In reality, the probe did interview key campaign and administration figures like former campaign chair Paul Manafort and presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, but still: Neither Trump, his defenders, nor his critics have demonstrated the investigation meaningfully impeded any real policy projects.

Trump himself regularly claims to be the most accomplished American president ever, and he clearly has plenty of time for television and golf. "Despite the disgusting, illegal and unwarranted Witch Hunt," he once tweeted, "we have had the most successful first 17 month Administration in U.S. history — by far!" So there you have it: Per Trump, Mueller's probe did not steal substantial policy time.

What it did take, though, is attention — press attention the president wanted to be used to his benefit. Each new testimony, indictment, and court filing got days of news coverage, little to none of it favorable to Trump. Mueller did not need to find evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia or end the investigation by indicting the president for his probe to produce months of stories reiterating how Trump and his associates are, if not criminal, certainly very far from an integrous crowd. The media covered these stories at length, to Trump's incessant vocal dismay.

Before Trump won the 2016 election — before we were deluged with think pieces on "Trump country" and whether economics or racism or religiosity or whatever proved most crucial to that win — a frequently proposed explanation of the president's campaign was that it was a publicity stunt. The goal was gaining business for the Trump brand, not taking the White House. In running for president, Trump "was simply doing what he always does," posited a representative New York Post op-ed. "Promote the Donald. Generate headlines. Get people talking."

The final weeks of the general election included a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Trump's then-new Washington, D.C., hotel, drawing a rush of speculation that this, not 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, was the capital city address Trump cared about all along.

"As his poll numbers have declined in the closing weeks of the presidential race, Donald J. Trump has begun to engage in barely veiled promotions of his business brand off the campaign trail," reportedThe New York Times in a story proposing Trump was "at least partly casting his eye beyond the 2016 race, and toward bolstering the brand that bears his name." The event was "just the latest in a pattern of promotions" in which "Trump has used the media attention given to his presidential campaign to highlight his brand," noted NPR, while Target Marketingoutlined a multi-decade history of Trump using presidential runs to offset business failures.

Some of Trump's own comments, lackadaisical about the presidency but enthusiastic about his business ventures, have fed this impression too. "He said, 'I think we'll win, and if not, that's okay too,'" then-campaign manager Kellyanne Conway reported of her candidate in late October 2016. "I sort of thought I lost, and I was okay with that," Trump explained to a rally crowd shortly after his victory, recounting how initial exit polls looked favorable to Hillary Clinton. "If I lose, I lose," he added, "and I'm gonna have a nice, easy life." As recently as this past November, Trump told reporters there "was a good chance that I wouldn't have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?"

This weekend's whining about "stolen" time, even in jest, suggests the publicity stunt hypothesis still checks out. It may be too much to say he never wanted to be president, but unquestionably the fate of Trump's personal brand always mattered more to him than that of his political career proper. And that's still the case today. The only time Mueller "stole" from Trump was potentially positive media time, and that's the time he values most.

Unmoved by the enthusiasm of House freshmen and Joe Biden alike, Democratic leadership has no apparent intention of impeaching President Trump on the basis of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report and/or former Trump attorney Michael Cohen's alleged campaign finance violations. This is at least partly a matter of strategy: Impeachment proceedings are realistically unlikely to conclude with removal measures under a GOP-controlled Senate, and removing Trump from office would be seen by the public, left and right both, as the defining indicator of impeachment success.

But there is a case against the president which congressional Democrats can plausibly win on: emoluments.

Granted, this does not offer the treason thrill of Mueller-inspired collusion and obstruction accusations, nor does it have the carnal scandal of Cohen's porn star payoff claims. The emoluments case is just ordinary corruption motivated by ordinary greed — and that's precisely why it may be actionable in a way these other cases are not.

The Constitution's emoluments clause bans the president from accepting gifts — which may be understood to include any "profit," "gain," "benefit," or "advantage" — from foreign governments absent congressional consent. Because Trump did not divest his assets in the Trump Organization on election, business between his properties and foreign governments potentially runs afoul of this anti-bribery measure. (The Trump Organization has promised to donate profits from foreign entities to the U.S. Treasury, but the math on those donations is disputed, as is the question of whether this pledge is enough to avoid conflicts of interest.)

In March, for example, Trump tweeted that his golf course in Scotland "furthers U.K. relationship!" — by which he seemed to mean that his personal property could strengthen official ties between Washington and London.

Meanwhile, the first eight months of Trump's tenure saw 13 requests from foreign governments to the State Department to rent from Trump World Tower in New York City, which Reutersnotes is "more solicitations from foreign governments for new or renewed leases in that building than in the previous two years combined." Saudi Arabia insisted its sole interest in the building was the proximity to the United Nations headquarters — but surely the tower was just as convenient to the U.N. before Trump took office?

And then there's Trump’s hotel in Washington, which has become a popular place for foreign delegations to stay. The Embassy of the Philippines held a celebration there because, in the words of Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez, the venue choice was "a statement that we have a good relationship with this president." Does a statement like that amount to a bribe?

Plenty of the president's critics say yes, and already three emoluments lawsuits against Trump are underway. The most promising of these may be the one brought by about 200 Democratic senators and representatives led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). After winning permission to sue Trump in September, the plaintiffs scored another victory last week when a federal district judge rejected the Justice Department's push for a narrow interpretation of the emoluments clause which would exclude commercial transactions. The decision cited a 1993 DOJ opinion declaring the language of the clause "both sweeping and unqualified." It insisted that as president Trump has "no discretion [and] no authority" to decide whether to perform his constitutionally-mandated duty of seeking congressional permission when foreign governments' emoluments are offered.

That Trump would try to bypass such a process in his eagerness to abuse his position for personal gain is not difficult to imagine. This is a man who thought it suitable to use eminent domain to try to hound an elderly widow from her home so his soon-bankrupt casino could have a new limo parking lot. He loves the idea of government seizing private property so a "tremendous economic development" can move forward. He has a long history of seeking to use state power to benefit his own bottom line, so why would he drop that habit now?

Trump's entire brand is gaudy and unscrupulous greed. "My whole life I've been greedy, greedy, greedy," he said at a 2016 rally. "I've grabbed all the money I could get. I'm so greedy." A lifelong embrace of greed like that does not dissipate overnight. The presidential oath of office has no power to dispel it. Trump the president is just as greedy as Trump the businessman, and he is probably just as willing to use the state to his advantage, too — only now, he's operating from the other side of the law.

Trump has defended himself against emoluments allegations by noting that, though he did not divest himself from his business, his sons are managing it while he's in office. But the Constitution doesn't have an "unless you put your kids in charge" exception. It doesn't exclude commercial transactions, and it doesn't address the president's motives, good or ill, in accepting a foreign emolument. Trump doesn't need to have actually granted (or even wanted to grant) special favors in exchange for the business his properties are getting from foreign governments for his failure to seek congressional permission to be unconstitutional.

That's a pretty low bar to clear, and it seems likely congressional Democrats can clear it. True, emoluments violations are improbable as a path to impeachment and removal for all the reasons that apply to other potential impeachment cases. But a court victory could serve to shift marginal public opinion in an electorally consequential manner, open the president's finances to further legal scrutiny, or simply detract from Trump's ability to pursue policy ends on which he could otherwise focus.

The Mueller and Cohen cases may offer a bigger reward, but they also come with higher risks. Emoluments may be a little boring and procedural, but if the goal is demonstrating beyond a doubt that Trump broke the law, it's the best thing going.

Joe Biden is having a moment. The former vice president delayed his presidential campaign announcement for months after those of other serious Democratic contenders, but since jumping into the race in late April with a tweet that looks like my mom's texts, he has surged to the front of the pack.

And that may well prove true. Or it may be that, three quarters of a year from now, when the presidential primaries actually begin, Biden's moment will have long since vanished. It is even conceivable — maybe not likely, but certainly possible — he will drop out of the race before the Iowa caucuses ever begin. The reality is we just don't know, and horse race polling at this stage is historically non-predictive to the point of being utterly useless. I suppose I shouldn't say this, as a member of the media, but: There's no good reason to follow it at all.

As of this writing, we are 552 days from the 2020 general election. At the same distance from the 2008 election, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani led the GOP field by 12.4 points, and he would hold on to that advantage for 249 days.

After edging out competitors John McCain and Fred Thompson for months of frontrunner status, especially in high-delegate states like California and New York, Giuliani came under fire for his position on abortion, alleged corruption during his mayoral tenure, and links to a member of the Qatari royal family who was in turn said to be linked to al Qaeda. He didn't bother to compete in Iowa; finished an embarrassing fourth in New Hampshire; came in sixth in Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina; and withdrew from the race by the end of January after a crushing loss in Florida, where last-minute rallies attracted barely more supporters than press.

These days, "America's mayor" is living out the desperately sad old age of a man either habituated or addicted to beclowning himself on television at ungodly hours on Sunday morning.

The 2008 Republican race was no anomaly in this regard. Hillary Clinton led the Democratic field at the same point in that contest, and she continued to do so for 286 more days before Barack Obama's eventual victory. When we were 552 days out from the 2016 election, Jeb! Bush was the Republican frontrunner, and Donald Trump was a month and a half away from riding down his golden escalator to launch his campaign. (All these numbers come via The Washington Post's "Who led?" project, which provides daily updates on who led each primary race on the comparable day in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections.)

The 2012 GOP and 2016 Democratic primaries were more predictable at this stage — their eventual victors both led at the 552-day mark — but hardly a surefire thing. The 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, repeatedly slipped from frontrunner status in the fall of 2011 and spring of 2012. In December of 2011, Newt Gingrich briefly led with 35 percent support. In February of 2012, Rick Santorum surged to first with 34 percent. Clinton's ascendancy in 2016 was more certain, but as a two-candidate race for the bulk of the contest, it is the least like 2020's crowded Democratic field.

America’s presidential elections are insufferably protracted, lasting nearly half the term of the office they fill. This will be a long horse race. Think endurance riding, not the quick thrill of the Kentucky Derby (though the election is likely to make you feel the need for a mint julep). And while you are probably not running for president yourself — though honestly, as the Democratic field threatens to hit 30, maybe you are? — you'll need to pace yourself, too.

You have more important things to do with your time than tracking polls which are at present essentially meaningless. Unless you are a campaign staffer, there is no value in getting worked up over who is leading who with what demographics in which states when we are months away from the first primary debates and may not even have the final slate of declared candidates to consider.

Even if you have a Ron Paul 2008 or Bernie Sanders 2016-style loyalty to one contender, you following the horse race nine months before the first primary will not do him or her an iota of good — but you may well burn yourself out, limiting any actual personal contribution you might make to your candidate's success when it counts.

A lot can and will change between now and Iowa, let alone the general election. Biden may indeed be the Democrat to beat, but he may also follow Giuliani's path to an early exit. Either way, we are in a totally useless portion of the primaries in which almost nothing matters at all. Do yourself a favor and ignore it for a while.

President Trump's trade war has been underway for some time, and by his account we should be winning it any day now.

"When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win," he tweeted in March of 2018. "Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore-we win big."

"It's easy!" Trump concluded. Except for all the ways it's not — ways that are becoming increasingly evident as the promised victory persistently fails to materialize more than a year past the imposition of this administration's signature steel and aluminum tariffs. Trump's trade war is only getting worse, and his bizarre economic ignorance is doing real damage to the American economy he claims to protect.

The trade war has a sort of funhouse logic once you realize Trump does not understand how trade works. Schooled, no doubt, by his own decades of swindling, he is certain that whoever makes the sale gets the win. There is no space in his framework for mutual benefit, for the possibility that an exchange of cash for goods might end with both parties feeling better off than they were before. The only game Trump knows is zero-sum, and the sum is always monetary. This is how he can rave, without a whit of recognition of his own absurdity, that "if we didn't trade, we'd save a hell of a lot of money."

The president likewise fails to grasp how tariffs work. He does not seem to realize that import taxes are only partially a punishment for the nations and producers they target, and that insofar as American buyers are undeterred — whether by taste or necessity — from purchasing tariffed goods, it is we who foot the higher bill. Nor does Trump apparently fathom how the retaliation his tariffs engender can cost Americans at least as much as the foreign populations he hopes to make suffer.

But they can, which is why a National Association for Business Economics survey reported Monday found three in four business economists in the goods producing sector (think agriculture, manufacturing, and the like) say Trump's trade war has had negative effects on their businesses. Though the outlook was not quite so grim in other sectors, a mere 1 percent said the impact of Trump's tariff escalation was positive.

Farmers have been particularly hard hit, as a recent New York Timesprofile of Wisconsin's dairy industry explained in fresh detail. Since Trump took office, the report notes, almost 1,200 Wisconsin dairy farms have ceased to be dairy farms. Some have declared bankruptcy; others have shifted to other pursuits, like beef or crop production, in an effort to stave it off. "Trump's trade approach has pushed many of Wisconsin's struggling dairy farmers to the edge," the Times writes, as his "sweeping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum ... have set off retaliatory tariffs from Mexico, Canada, Europe, and China on U.S. dairy products."

The Trump administration ministered to its trade war's agricultural casualties last summer with a $12 billion farm bailout, a package promptly condemned by the American Farm Bureau Federation as an inevitably inadequate substitute for restoration of normal trade relations. The bailout's overwhelming insufficiency is even more obvious now: One Wisconsin farm family in the Times article received a whopping $400 from the program, nowhere near enough to allow them to keep milking cows. The family is now in the process of leaving the dairy industry to raise beef cattle in hopes of saving their farm.

Yet when he spoke in Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump was either unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the effects his anti-market policies have had on the farmers he professes to champion. "I came up here a year ago, and I was with farmers," Trump said, spinning a tale in which he figured as the patron saint of Wisconsin agriculture for his negotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a relatively modest NAFTA reform deal which Congress has yet to approve.

Yes, USMCA will make it somewhat easier for American dairy farmers to sell their products in Canada. But it's not clear how much that will really change for the U.S. dairy industry, and it certainly won't help farmers who have already been pushed out of the dairy industry by economic conditions created significantly by Trump's own trade war.

Trump in Wisconsin praised his tariffs scheme and pushed for Congress to approve his trade deal — an outcome congressional Republicans, in a rare burst of intraparty dissent, have indicated will only happen if the tariffs are lifted. He bemoaned the state's "scars, empty buildings" caused by bad trade policies past and mourned the loss of family farms to onerous federal economic policies, all without a drop of irony. He demonstrated yet again his motivating ignorance on trade, stubbornly oblivious to the destruction it can unleash.

America's asylum system is far from perfect. For all President Trump's counterfactual caterwauling about the nature of the crisis at the border and what we should do to fix it, he is not wrong that a problem exists. Why and how that problem ought to be addressed is something reasonable, well-intentioned people can debate.

Much less debatable is the merit of Trump's Monday night directive asking for new asylum rules to be implemented within 90 days. Particularly notable — and appalling — among Trump’s requests were the demands for "a fee for an asylum application," "a fee for an initial application for employment authorization for the period an asylum claim is pending," and a ban on work authorization for migrants who "entered or attempted to enter the United States unlawfully ... before any applicable application for relief or protection from removal has been granted."

It remains to be seen whether these proposals will ever take effect. They may be blocked in court — and so they should. This order does nothing to distinguish between those with and without legitimate asylum claims; makes obtaining asylum substantially harder for legitimate claimants; makes reliance on public assistance programs more likely; and, by forcing desperate, unemployed people to spend money they don't have, could incentivize some of the very behavior Trump says he wants to stop at the border.

The asylum process as it stands is messy in execution but simple enough to describe. Asylum applicants are asked to demonstrate that they have been persecuted or are at risk of persecution in their home countries because of their "race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." Application may be made proactively, within a year of arriving in the U.S. by any means (including illegal entry), or "defensively," as an effort to avoid deportation.

The rationales for this system are easy to grasp, and so is its potential for misuse by those who know they do not meet the requirements but are determined to stay in the United States anyway. Perhaps, like me, you'd respond to that dynamic by making other types of entry easier. Or perhaps you think we should reform the asylum process to make it less attractive to those other migrants. Either way, Trump's fees and work limits program doesn't help.

One critique immigration restrictionists often make is that, in the words of Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), the asylum system is "unfair ... for migrants with real asylum claims." But Trump's order will affect all asylum applicants equally. Those with claims fitting that list of risks for persecution will be required to pay the application and work permit fees right alongside those facing no such dangers.

Illegal entry is no indication of an asylum claim's validity both in practice and under current law, which means some asylum seekers whose claims will ultimately and rightly be approved will be banned from working in the months if not years it takes to adjudicate their cases. (Already, even asylum seekers who made a proactive application after legal entry to the U.S. are arbitrarily prohibited from working for at least 150 days after their application is submitted.)

Thus, though Trump's rules may be intended as a deterrent to illegitimate claims, they are an imprecise tool that will make an already difficult process substantially more arduous for people fleeing true persecution.

First there's the upfront financial expense, and it is plausible that an application fee "not to exceed the costs of adjudicating the application" could be hefty, especially for someone coming from a nation like Honduras, which has a per capita GDP of $5,500 and 20 percent of the population making less than $2 a day. Even if the fee is duly paid, the work ban while the application is reviewed requires asylum seekers who entered the country illegally — as they may have done, understandably, to get around the Trump administration's reported practice of turning them away from legal ports of entry — to rely on others while they wait to learn their fate.

Because not every migrant will be fortunate enough to have family, friends, or a charitable organization to support them during that time, the work ban makes asylum applicants' reliance on public assistance programs more likely. Generally asylum seekers are not eligible for federally funded benefits, but some state-run programs are available, and desperation may motivate fraud. Immigration restrictionists regularly raise the specter of "lazy" immigrants leeching off public programs to which they do not contribute via income taxes — so why throw up a new barrier to honest work?

Some asylum seekers, kept from working by the 150-day rule, have become homeless because they had no way to support themselves. Trump's new regulations would make that and other undesirable outcomes, including drug trafficking and prostitution, more likely. Trump uses the drug and sex trades as fallacious arguments for border wall construction, but here he has shifted from advocating something that will not prevent these vices to actively incentivizing them. If licit work is banned, illicit work will begin to appeal. Migrants who might otherwise never consider selling drugs may do so if it appears as the only option to feed themselves and their families.

However our asylum policies ought to change, Trump's order is not the way to go. It is clumsy and callous, rife with predictable unwanted consequences and sure to make a bad situation worse.

Well, not in the yard itself, which is presently in an appalling state of post-winter disarray featuring an embarrassing quantity of dog poop. His actual designs are for the space occupied by our two-car garage, which, in the style of most historic homes here in the Twin Cities, is located at the back of the lot for alley access. His idea — which I support — is to use that space to build upwards, replacing the garage with a two-story unit with parking on one level and a granny flat on the other. Even if his parents never moved in, the structure would be a safe long-term investment we could rent via Airbnb or, more likely, to less transitory tenants.

Luckily for us, this plan is legal where we live. That has not always been the case, nor is it the case in lots of American cities. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs), as they're called in urban planning parlance, are prohibited in many localities. The legal tide is starting to shift, but it should be shifting faster. ADUs are an obvious answer to America's increasingly urgent housing needs, and they ought to be an easy sell across the political spectrum.

In my own neighborhood, ADUs were legalized less than a year ago. A very limited pilot program permitted construction of granny flats, carriage houses, mother-in-law apartments, and the like in a few areas of St. Paul starting in 2016 (some older properties were previously grandfathered in), but legalization only went citywide this past October. "I've heard from many of my constituents who are really excited about the opportunity ... for affordable housing, to create additional density, and providing housing for seniors to age in place," said one city council member who supported new ordinance.

Her comment summarizes the case for legal ADUs for urbanists and YIMBYs ("yes in my backyard") on the left: It's a grassroots option for creating affordable housing that increases density without destroying the historic character and community of established neighborhoods. ADUs can help mitigate homelessness and accommodate urban population growth almost invisibly, especially when new units are added by adapting existing structures instead of constructing from scratch.

Though ADUs can be expensive — we estimate our garage apartment project would cost slightly more than what we paid for our house, though less than its present value — for homeowners who can afford to build, it's the ultimate in buying local, keeping investment dollars very close to home. ADUs also increase property values and thus property taxes, boosting local school budgets, and this sort of smaller structure is an environmentally friendly development option compared to larger new builds. Added density can prevent displacement in newly popular neighborhoods, and ADUs can make more expensive neighborhoods accessible to young adults, the elderly, and other populations who can't swing (and don't need) an entire single-family home in those areas.

For Americans who lean right, the case for ADUs is even simpler: If you want to build a granny flat on your own land, the government should not be able to stop you. For all the communal benefits ADUs have to offer, their legality is also a matter of individual liberty and the basic privileges that ought to come with property rights in America.

Moreover, the rising interest in ADUs around the country is the market in action: Americans have noticed there's a housing need to be filled, and they're eager to fill it — profitably — if only local bureaucrats will let them. ADUs are a "bottom-up, decentralized, incremental, scalable, and adaptable" niche in the housing market, and the state should stop erecting obstacles to their construction and onerous limits on how they can be used.

I'm sold on both cases. I want to be able to use my property as I like and to seize what I think could be a worthwhile investment opportunity in a city where housing prices seem to climb daily. But I also want to help slow that climb, to make a quite literally small contribution to affordable housing in our neighborhood.

The added density ADUs encourage is also a big part of their appeal for me: I want more neighbors. They'll enrich our community culture, supporting local businesses and encouraging walkability. Their presence alone provides what urbanist Jane Jacobs called "eyes on the street," which is the idea that cities are safer and more peaceful when there are lots of neighbors around. Empty city neighborhoods can be a magnet for crime; bustling ones usually aren’t.

Though I am a committed St. Paul partisan — as all Twin Cities residents should be — I must concede Minneapolis is strides ahead of us where this sort of housing policy is concerned. Still, last year's ADU legalization was a major point of progress, and the sort of progress cities across the U.S. ought to imitate. Whether justified on grounds of affordable housing, personal freedom, or both, legalizing granny flats is a cause that should unite America.

At 6 a.m. on any Sunday, if you've made the sort of poor life choices that can land you a gig like personal attorney to the president of the United States or counselor to the same, you probably have the misfortune of spending the next hour spouting spin and half-truths in heavy makeup before a national audience. For these sad souls, participating in cable and network news shows is part of the job, particularly with a television addict for a boss.

We know why politicians and those who wish to influence them are incessantly willing to argue and pontificate on camera. But why would anyone be willing to watch? Why would we voluntarily subject ourselves to such an awful and unnecessary means of news consumption? And will enough of us ever stop watching to get rid of this scourge for good?

I grew up in a TV-less house, by which I mean we didn't have cable and I rarely had reception (or permission) to tune into network shows. Our VCR was plenty busy on the weekend, but a few Saturday morning cartoons and the occasional ­X-Files episode aside, we didn't watch live TV. Thus I encountered television news for the first time as an adult — and if you haven't spent years acquiring its foul taste, it's immediately obvious this stuff is awful.

To be sure, not all TV news is equally bad. Local news, done well, can be a vital part of city life and politics, holding officials accountable and providing viewers legitimately useful information about their immediate communities. Even straight TV reporting of national news may have value, though it always strikes me as a wildly inefficient way to learn about current events in the digital age.

But straight reporting is not all, or even most, of what passes for news on television. The commitment to 24-hour coverage incentivizes attention to frivolous non-stories as well as the addition of commentary and mixed format programs — think of those Sunday morning shows, plus weekday productions like Fox & Friends or Morning Joe and evening fare like Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow's respective offerings. Their topics, hosts, and style make them functionally part of the news lineup even if their broadcasters categorize them separately from more traditional journalism.

These shows are poison. Compared to print counterparts, they leave viewers more susceptible to misinformation and focus more on personality than policy. They are, as Jon Stewart complained in that infamous Crossfire appearance, "hurting America."

Yet contra Stewart, the problem cannot be narrowed to individual hosts' partisan hackery and theatrics. There is certainly plenty of that on offer, but so too are efforts at conscientious and credible journalism. Nor is commentary a bad thing (wrote the political commentator).

No, the larger problem with this branch of TV news is that it is inherently structured to stoke controversy and foster sensationalism. "The medium doesn't want thoughtfulness and bridge-building," as The Week's Joel Mathis has argued. A cutting exchange or outrageous soundbite — a "truth isn't truth" or "alternative facts" — is a win, inspiring headlines and driving viewership and the ad revenues that come with it. There is no time or patience for the editorial filter of written commentary and prepared statements or speeches. Conflict, speed, and quotability are the currency of this format (to say nothing of its close cousin, talk radio), even on comparatively serious and responsible shows. Dysfunction attracts attention.

This is exactly why President Trump can't seem to tear himself away. His tweeted fixation is an ugly thing to see, as he rages and preens his way through hours of programming week in and week out. If I weren't already averse to TV news, watching Trump watch would put me off it for good.

But are other people put off too? This is what I don't know.

Polling shows television news is less popular among younger viewers than with their parents' and grandparents' generations: Millennial and gen Z news consumers are more likely to turn to print sources while our elders favor network and cable shows. But is this a persistent generational difference — or is it about different life stages? That is, will millennials like me always eschew TV news, or will our news consumption habits at 60 or 70 look a lot like the news consumption habits of people who are 60 or 70 today?

Maybe as old age approaches, there's some inexorable pull toward these horrible programs which my peers and I simply have yet to feel. Or maybe as older generations die, this dysfunctional news format will die with them. Maybe television news as we know it will be a relatively fleeting failure.

"The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country," President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said Tuesday of investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. "You look at what Russia did — buying some Facebook ads to try and sow dissent. And it's a terrible thing, but I think the investigation and all the speculation that's happened over the past two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy."

As Kushner no doubt knows, “buying some Facebook ads” is not all the Russian government did. The social media operations alone were far more complex and varied, to say nothing of the hacking of Democratic officials' email accounts. Kushner's convenient oversimplification deserves the pushback it's received.

But his comments do raise an issue which hasn't been examined enough, which is how to deal with this sort of informal election interference that is effective, essentially, because of our failure to see through it. How do we defend against election tampering that runs on our own gullibility and ignorance?

The investigations Kushner decried have been valuable for establishing what happened, but their findings also highlight law enforcement's very limited means to right these wrongs. Think about what Russian social media operatives actually did: In addition to the ads, they created ordinary accounts, groups, and pages to simply interact with voters. Much of their reach was organic, meaning they didn't need to pay for advertising to get clicks, likes, and shares.

Millions of Americans followed and propagated the Russians' content because they decided it was worth that attention. (Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report notes an estimated 126 million people on Facebook and 1.4 million people on Twitter were reached by posts from Russian Internet Research Agency-controlled accounts, though that certainly reach does not guarantee effective influence.) In some cases, Americans even attended real life rallies and meet-ups organized online by Russian accounts, and they went because they wanted to go.

And here's the rub where redress and prophylaxis are concerned: None of that is illegal, nor is there an obvious way to ban any of it without thoroughly shredding the First Amendment's protections of speech, press, and assembly.

This isn't like stuffing a physical ballot box, compromising online voting, or hacking political opponents' emails. Posting fake news articles or misleading political memes on the internet is not a crime — and with good reason. Obviously the world in general and American politics in particular would be better if no one were ever wrong on the internet, but that is not a circumstance state regulation can or should attempt to produce. (I suppose some sort of libel prosecution might be attempted for content which spreads falsehoods about specific individuals, but American defamation laws are deliberately defensive of free speech, especially when government officials and matters of public concern are involved. That many fake news sites include a satire disclaimer and that memes are generally seen as an unserious medium combine to make this sort of solution even less probable.)

So maybe social media companies will be able to proactively identify and shut down the accounts of would-be election meddlers before they can develop much influence. And maybe Washington will be able to coerce state actors, like Russia, into leaving our elections alone. But there's only so much protection and punishment possible. This sort of social media meddling will never go away entirely.

Unless it just stops working. Would anyone bother making fake social media accounts to dupe voters if voters couldn't be duped? Would anyone spend their days crafting false stories and lying memes that hit just the right balance of outrage and plausibility if no one shared or believed them?

The good news is most people already avoid spreading false content online. A study published inScience Advances in January found only 8.5 percent of Facebook users shared one or more fake news stories in 2016. Even if the share rate were twice that on Facebook or other social platforms like Twitter, that would still mean the vast majority of Americans are never actively disseminating any of this stuff online. Of course, not everyone who is influenced by such content will share it, and that broader, less visible effect is difficult, if not impossible, to measure, especially because of the subtle mechanism in action. The meddler's work is designed to play into our biases, confirm our fears, inflame our emotions, and shift our views — all without our noticing any of this is happening.

I don't have any panacea to offer against that influence, though digital literacy and a self-interrogating skepticism would go a long way toward defanging this 2016-style interference.

The Science Advances study found age to be the single demographic factor consistently linked to sharing fake news: "More than one in 10, or 11.3 percent, of people over age 65 shared links from a fake news site, while only 3 percent of those age 18 to 29 did so," the study authors explained inThe Washington Post. "These gaps between old and young hold up even after controlling for partisanship and ideology. No other demographic characteristic we examined — gender, income, education — had any consistent relationship with the likelihood of sharing fake news."

It's possible that "digital native" generations will also be more easily fooled by fake news as they age, the researchers allowed, but I suspect their alternative hypothesis — that age is functioning as a proxy for digital illiteracy — is closer to the truth. Either way, developing the skills to identify false information on the internet has officially become part of what it means to be a responsible voter.

Skepticism, including scrutiny of our own feelings and assumptions, is necessary for all demographics. Research shows manipulative, false content is crafted to evoke more dramatic emotions in us than true news stories typically effect. Those stronger reactions prompt higher rates of online engagement, which in turn attracts broader attention. When a story or image we encounter on social media "produces feelings of amazement, anxiety, shock, and repulsion," as fake news is wont to do, our habit should be to notice that response in ourselves and be skeptical of the content's claim.

Even taking a few seconds to google additional sources may be enough to debunk many lies. And if we don't have the time, wherewithal, or discipline to practice such skepticism consistently, removing all political content from our social media feeds is a good alternative. The news — the real news — will still be available, whenever you want to read it, from sources far more trustworthy than some random (and maybe Russian) page whose grainy, half-literate memes your aunt just loves to share.

Russia's 2016 election meddling wasn't just Facebook ads (and accounts and groups and pages and so on), but it was those, too. This type of interference almost certainly can't be stopped by law enforcement, but its influence is something any and all of us can negate.

"Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress a hundred days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws," Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said Monday evening on CNN. "And if they fail to do it," the Democratic presidential candidate continued, "I will take executive action."

The details of her gun control plan are irrelevant here. Suffice it to say they’ll appeal to the average Democrat — her town hall crowd gave a hearty round of applause — and garner rather less enthusiasm from most Republicans. But what shouldn't draw anyone's support, regardless of party affiliation or views on gun rights, is this 100-day ultimatum. It turns on a fundamental misconception of the nature of executive power in America — the same misconception, in fact, that President Trump has exploited to contemptible ends.

The president is not supposed to be a policymaker. I know, I know, we usually conceive of a responsible voter as one who sifts candidates based on their platforms, not lesser considerations like personality or whether it'd be enjoyable to drink a beer in their company. And that's right, to a point. Certainly, a president's ideas matter and will shape the direction of the country during their tenure in office. That's especially so for foreign policy, where the president's constitutional role as commander in chief affords considerable say-so in the conduct and conclusion of ongoing wars, of which we have many.

Likewise, executive discretion means the president has some (legally vague and disputable) leeway in how to enforce the law, and the sheer number of rules on the books at this point necessitates limited enforcement priorities: "The reach of federal law has grown so vast that no administration can target more than a small percentage of violations, thereby unavoidably giving the president broad discretion," explains Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University.

But the presidency is nevertheless designed as an administrative position. Congress creates policy, and the president administers it. The legislative branch legislates, and the executive branch executes.

So yes, the president's policy commitments are important, but it's not because the president is a formal source of policy. If a president has been in office 100 days and Congress has declined to pass legislation as he or she desires, there's not a lot to be done. The Constitution doesn't have an ultimatum clause. There's no 100-day timer which, once triggered, buzzes lawmaking power over to the White House.

Even when Congress makes the president very unhappy, the balance of powers does not change. Even when Congress makes the people very unhappy, the balance of powers does not change. If we don't like what Congress is doing (or not doing), the solution is to get a different Congress. It is not to shrug our shoulders and let the president rule by fiat.

And it shouldn't have to be said, but that's so whether we have a President Harris or a President Trump, whether the policy problem at hand is gun rights and regulations or, say, constructing an expensive and useless wall on our southern border. Indeed, the plan Harris outlined Monday is a Democratic version of Trump's border wall national emergency, equally blatant in its intent to ride roughshod over constitutional separation of powers should Congress decline to act as the president wants.

As a senator, Harris should recognize the problem with this approach. A February statement from her Senate office about Trump's revealingly lackadaisical emergency declaration decried it as a "ridiculous" effort "to circumvent the authority of Congress ... to pay for the president's vanity project." Now, as a presidential candidate, these scruples are nowhere to be found. "I could do the gun reform over a longer period of time," she could say of her ultimatum, in paraphrase of Trump on his emergency. "I didn't need to do this. But I would rather do it much faster."

This functional concentration of power in the president — any president — may seem convenient, even "inspiring," when wielded by a politician you like in service of policies you support. But the danger here should be obvious with just a little foresight: That politician will not be in office forever, and soon a very different president will wield that power for a very different purpose.

The expansions of executive authority under the Bush and Obama administrations presented Trump with a "turnkey tyranny," and Trump's end-runs around Congress will in turn set precedent a future Democratic president like Harris will similarly abuse.

And absent major structural reform, we will be stuck in this cycle forever, governed not by a balance of ambition tempering ambition but by the increasingly unfettered choices of a single person holding far more power than any human ought to have. This spiral toward authoritarianism may not be inevitable, but that significant portions of the population are myopic enough to cheer its progress in Harris while condemning it in Trump — and vice versa — does not give me much hope.

Every few years, some politician too old to be personally affected by his own proposal trots out a new pitch for mandatory (or, at least, strongly encouraged) national service for America's youth. In 2002, it was Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.); more recently, John McCain and Hillary Clinton outlined plans for service schemes they described less as compulsion and more as opportunity.

Now presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has taken up the cause. He liked his time in the military, Buttigieg told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow this week, especially for how it connected him to "very different Americans," people with "different politics, different generation, different racially, different regionally." And he would like more Americans to experience that same sort of "social cohesion" without having to go to war.

"One thing we could do ... would be to make it, if not legally obligatory, then certainly a social norm that anybody after they're 18 spends a year in national service," Buttigieg said, adding that this is "one of the ideas that everybody likes."

It's really not. It's an idea liked by people who will never personally be conscripted. It's an idea liked by people who haven't grappled with the implications of giving the state the right to take a year of your life. And it's especially an idea liked by people who haven't thought through the realistic implications of having a few million young people available to do Washington's bidding, a mental exercise that should be exceedingly easy — and troublesome — in what Buttigieg is correct to call a fractured era.

First, the question of age. "If national service is so good," notesThe Economist, "everyone should do it." But the proposal is never thus universalized. It's always limited to young adults, which is an odd thing if the motivation, as Buttigieg says, is not military defense — where age may be relevant for its link to physical fitness — but renewed social cohesion. Don't older generations need to meet "very different Americans," too?

This puzzle isn't difficult to solve. Older adults "conclude, reasonably enough, that the benefit to society is not worth the cost to their personal liberty." Thus polling finds support for mandatory service is related to age in a perfect inverse: The older you are, the more likely you are to endorse Buttigieg's plan — which is to say, the safer you are from losing a year of your youth to the federal government, the more likely you are to say other people should lose a year of theirs. This difference is not the product of wisdom. It is selfishness cloaked in a costless pretense of civic virtue.

As for that cost to personal liberty, Buttigieg's focus on domestic over military service only negates some of the ethical dilemma for potential conscripts. All of the offense to the rights of the individual inherent to the draft remain. A service requirement doesn't have to force anyone to go to war to be an illegitimate seizure of our time and freedom to use it as we choose.

I don't often find myself quoting former President Ronald Reagan, but he was entirely correct in condemning compulsory national service for its "assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state — not for parents, the community, the religious institutions, or teachers — to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where, and how in our society."

That question of what work should be done by our youthful conscripts is equally worth consideration. It does not take much imagination to realize what national service kids would be doing right now if such a program existed. In our present state of so-called national emergency, they would almost certainly be sent to southern Texas for construction work, and President Trump's border wall construction would be proceeding at a rather faster pace than it is now.

If the wall doesn't bother you, it should not be difficult to imagine a presidential project that would. What might former President Barack Obama have done with the labor of several million young Americans at his disposal? Or former President George W. Bush? For anyone who really wants to involve Washington in their community service, more targeted options without such risk of executive misuse — like the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, VISTA, and USA Freedom Corps — already abound.

This is not to say there would be no positive effects of such a scheme. Social cohesion is a real concern, and I share Buttigieg's desire to revive it — though I'd prefer to do so unentangled from patriotism and fostered at a far more local and tangible scale. But we will not reinvigorate meaningful community by domesticating the draft. Mandatory service would be a pale, nationalized substitute for the real work people of all ages can and should do in our communities right now.

There are many questions in American foreign policy where reasonable, ethical, well-intentioned people can disagree. Whether it is right to continue U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition intervention in Yemen's civil war is not one of them.

Yet that is exactly what President Trump has decided to do, issuing the second veto of his presidency to reject S.J.Res.7, a "resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress." Trump's refusal to halt America's contribution to the world's most acute humanitarian crisis is utterly indefensible — a wretched recommitment to brutality — and his veto statement is a rat king of falsehoods, militarism, and unfettered executive overreach.

In a lengthy roster of Mideast misadventures of debatable morality, necessity, and execution, the conflict in Yemen stands out for its obscene effects on ordinary people. The United Nations estimates nearly 7,000 civilians had been killed and another 11,000 injured as of this past November. Since then, the pace of these deaths has increased.

Do you remember the school bus bombing? The one that killed 51 people, 40 of them children? That was a tiny fraction of those 7,000-plus deaths. Others were caused by coalition attacks on hospitals, funerals, weddings, schools, markets, refugee camps, and residential neighborhoods. These are strikes conducted with American guidance ("including intelligence sharing, logistics support, and, until recently, in-flight refueling of non-United States aircraft," to borrow Trump’s veto statement summary), often using American-made bombs whose sale was approved by our State Department. It is not histrionic to call them war crimes.

And those are just — "just"! — the direct casualties of war. But the horror in Yemen is hardly monopolized by bullets and bombs. Conservative estimates say 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of 5 have died of starvation since 2015. More than a million children are suffering from severe malnutrition, and fully half of Yemen's 28 million people are at risk of "the worst famine in 100 years."

Do you recall the first time you saw a photo of a Holocaust victim, skeletal with abuse? I remember, as a child, a rush of disbelief — not that it happened, but that anyone could experience such cruelty and live. Looking at images of starving children in Yemen, my shock is the same.

Of course, hunger in Yemen is nothing new: It was among the poorest nations in the Middle East before this conflict began. But this mass starvationis new, caused significantly by the Saudi coalition's blockade and long-term assault on the single port through which 70 percent of Yemen's food arrives. The blockade is ostensibly an attempt to keep weapons away from rebel fighters, but functionally — and with American help — it has tortured a nation that must import 90 percent of its food.

Then there's the cholera. Do you know how cholera works? In seven pandemics between 1800 and 1975 it killed millions worldwide, but in America today we have the luxury of ignorance of its symptoms.

The chief effect is catastrophic dehydration caused by vomiting and diarrhea, gallons a day. The skin turns blue from lack of fluids. Eyes are sunken, mouth dry, breathing labored. Cramps, seizures, coma, and secondary infections all may follow. Without proper medical treatment — and in Yemen, many medical professionals have operated for years without necessary equipment, medicine, facilities, or even pay — the death toll may be as high as 50 percent. Cholera is a miserable way to die, and it can take a child in mere hours.

Yemen's cholera outbreak is the worst on the planet. More than 600,000 cases have been confirmed, and at least another 400,000 are suspected. About 2,000 new cases are diagnosed daily, and more than half of the national population is at risk. Cholera spreads when people don't have access to clean water, and major water treatment facilities have featured among the targets U.S.-facilitated strikes have hit. Even water plants that remain intact sit idle, unable to operate because of fighting- and blockade-induced fuel shortages.

And so every 10 minutes a Yemeni child dies of preventable causes like hunger and cholera. Do you wonder how many died while the president's veto statement was composed?

This document is a masterpiece of B.S. It begins by claiming the "resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken [Trump's] constitutional authorities ... as Commander in Chief." That is exactly backwards, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recognized.

.@POTUS doesn’t have authority to engage our Armed Forces in this war regardless of this joint resolution. Congress never authorized war, so it’s unconstitutional and unlawful for the president to have entered the U.S. into hostilities. Stop aiding the Saudis in this brutality. https://t.co/xWFSOWgLYc

If any constitutional power has been dangerously weakened here, it is congressional authority over the initiation of war. Executive war-making in Yemen, as illegitimate in its conception by the Obama administration as it is in its perpetuation by Trump, remains perfectly intact.

Equally absurd is Trump's insistence that the United States is "not engaged in hostilities in or affecting Yemen" beyond its counterterrorism operations. This is an Orwellian lie, rendered particularly transparent by the statement's attention to Iran's more limited support of the Houthi rebels the Saudi-led coalition opposes. Suffice it to say if any foreign country offered intelligence sharing, logistics support, blockade assistance, and refueling for airstrikes on American soil, we would consider that nation "engaged in hostilities in or affecting" the United States, and rightly so.

Likewise troubling is the assertion that this intervention is justified "[f]irst and foremost" to protect "Americans who reside in certain coalition countries that have been subject to Houthi attacks." If taken seriously, this is an expansive excuse for U.S. war-making in literally any situation anywhere if an American happens to live or even travel nearby. So much for "not wanting to be the policemen of the world"?

These humanitarian, constitutional, and practical concerns are not the only reason Trump's veto was indefensible. We could also consider that the outcome of Yemen's civil war will have little to no effect on U.S. security; that the Saudi coalition has armed al Qaeda-linked fighters in Yemen with American weapons and fostered conditions in which Yemen's al Qaeda branch has flourished; that our involvement lends unjustified cover to an oppressive theocracy's proxy war for religious and regional supremacy; that polling shows most Americans across the political spectrum oppose this intervention; or that our exit could help achieve the "negotiated settlement" Trump says he wants.

Whatever reason you find most compelling, it is backed by an avalanche of others. There are many foreign policy issues where it may be reasonable to disagree, but this isn't one of them. Our contribution to Yemen's suffering must end.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) misspoke. In a speech about Islam and civil liberties in America, she described the 9/11 attacks with a phrase — "some people did something" — far too casual. In context, Omar's words were an inartful expression of a legitimate frustration: that, in the wake of this horror, the U.S. security state went into hyperdrive, and the rights of the innocent many were violated because of the abhorrent deeds of the guilty few. Out of context, her words have become a jingoistic cause célèbre.

Naturally, President Trump got in on the action, tweeting a video which juxtaposed Omar's phrase with graphic footage of the terror attacks. Omar reported receiving a "sharp increase" in death threats after the tweet, many of them explicitly referencing Trump's post. But, presented with this information by a local reporter while visiting Omar's home state on Monday, the president was unconcerned.

He had no second thoughts about the tweet, Trump said, "not at all." Omar has "got a way about her that's very, very bad, I think, for our country," he continued. "I think she's extremely unpatriotic and extremely disrespectful to our country."

The logic here is stunning: For those who demonstrate insufficient patriotism, death threats are no problem. In fact, they may even be appropriate. Fail to adequately perform uncritical affection for the United States and it will be noticed and punished. Real Americans police each other's patriotism, Trump seems to be saying, and those who are "extremely unpatriotic and extremely disrespectful to our country" cannot expect to get off scot-free.

Of course, it goes without saying that controversial speech will have consequences. Omar could not anticipate — and I very much doubt she did anticipate — that her speech would be met with universal agreement or even silence from those who don't share her views. No politician with a national profile would be naive enough to imagine she could avoid confrontation; in this very speech, in fact, Omar called on American Muslims to be willing to "make people uncomfortable" in their civil rights activism if necessary.

But there is a chasm between the consequences Omar could have rightfully expected (criticism, denunciation, lost votes, lost office) and those she got (death threats, fueled in part by a tweet from the president, who does not regret his role in inspiring what are hopefully empty menaces to Omar's life). The former is appropriate and normal — part of participating in public conversation in a country like ours. The latter is what happens when patriotism goes awry, when devotion to the nation-state takes a turn toward the idolatrous, when we stop wanting what is best for our communities and simply want to be the best, unchallenged by even what is intended as constructive critique.

This poisonous sort of patriotism — I'll use Trump's word, though "nationalism" would serve as well — is jealous and officious by nature. It demands to be complete, so it requires its observants be ever vigilant for dissent. The result is what the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh has astutely dubbed "patriotic correctness":

It's a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history, and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can't be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts, and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences. Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn't support the war effort enough. [Alex Nowrasteh via The Washington Post]

For those operating with a full-blown case of patriotic correctness — and Trump is unquestionably one of the fever's Typhoid Marys — "anything less than chest-thumping jingoism is capitulation" to those perceived to be America's enemies, Nowrasteh writes. It is, in effect, a type of treason (which, recall, is a death penalty offense. Trump's comfort with his role in Omar's receipt of death threats makes a certain grim sense by this rationale).

Thus it is no surprise to find Trump employing “treason” language with some regularity. "I think what the Democrats are doing with the Border is TREASONOUS," he tweeted last week, two days before posting the Omar video. This is a blatantly false accusation: Democrats' border security policies, whatever we think of them, simply do not fit the Constitution's intentionally precise definition of treason, which was narrowly crafted to avoid the abuse of this charge practiced by the monarchs of old Europe.

Kings who claimed to govern by divine right could levy charges of treason to suppress public dissent. Presidents of a nation ostensibly governed by its people — people who disagree on many things, immigration and our policy response to 9/11 both included — are not supposed to do the same.

That Trump does so, and that he does it with the support or at least indifference of so many, should serve as a glaring warning against the ugliness the patriotic correctness he practices can produce. Any demand of loyalty that has us making, condoning, or downplaying threats of murder over a crude turn of phrase is a loyalty imbalanced. It does not benefit our country, and it is no virtue.

That's not a slight on children, nor is it a suggestion that politics is a uniquely complex subject. It's not even to say that kids can't be right about politics — so long as we remember right and smart are not the same thing.

Unfortunately, we rarely do remember, as there is something about combining youth and politics which divests us of our common sense. We treat youth like a concentrating factor: It makes right statements better and wrong ones worse. When the children say something we like, they're precocious and important, and we jaded adults must heed the beautiful wisdom of youth. (This is how sincere iterations of "woke toddler" happen.) And when they offer views we oppose, they're just dumb kids who shouldn't be taken seriously. (This is how we get cruel brush-offs of teenage shooting survivors.)

That changeable fixation on youth sprouts up on right and left alike. A decade ago, many conservatives swooned for Jonathan Krohn, a besuited wunderkind who spoke at CPAC and landed a book deal at the tender age of 13. By 17, the author of Defining Conservatism was no longer a conservative. His early punditry was "naive," Krohn toldPolitico. "It's a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time. ... I live in Georgia. We're inundated with conservative talk in Georgia."

Indeed. And this would be obvious to all of us in any other context: A 13-year-old offering "their" ideas is mostly parroting what they've heard from adults they love and respect. This is not a bad thing! Imitative learning is an important part of childhood development; it helps us learn to speak, and it can help us learn to think, too — including about politics. But a child's ability to compellingly echo political perspectives is no indicator of those perspectives' value. Policy does not gain or lose merit because it comes from the mouth of babes.

Nor is it magically made simple by the fervor of youth. This spring has seen the fête of Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish girl whose environmental activism netted her a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thunberg is admirably determined and passionate — but she is also very much 16, declaring at Davos in January that it is "a lie" to say "nothing is black and white" and that the proper response to climate change is daily "panic" and "fear."

Thunberg may well maintain her present policy recommendations into adulthood, but her arguments will hopefully evolve. As we'd easily recognize where less inflammatory topics are concerned, older teenagers are capable of critical and original thinking, but they have limited life experience and tend to approach complicated topics with insufficient nuance.

When you're 16 or 18, it's easy to get excited about big ideas. It's rather more difficult to understand why rational, well-intentioned people might disagree with what strikes you as obviously, necessarily correct. Empathy requires practice, as does a fair weighing of competing practical considerations. We’re apt to forget it once an earnest teenager starts giving winning voice to views we share, but none of this changes when the context is political.

Yet perhaps even more troublesome than how we handle actual youth in politics is the way we expand this category well beyond its normal limits.

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the newest official entrant to the Democratic primary race, will almost certainly be decried by some for his youth, as his 37 years are young by presidential standards. Or witness the treatment accorded by her critics to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), aged 29. "The Green New Deal, done by a young bartender, 29 years old," President Trump recently sneered at her signature policy proposal. "A young bartender, wonderful young woman."

Ocasio-Cortez is young by the graying standards of Capitol Hill, sure, but she's hardly a child. She's older than at least three signers of the Declaration of Independence, and barely younger than Thomas Jefferson was — 33 — when he wrote it. Adulthood may arrive a bit later now than in 1776, but in every situation outside politics, a 29-year-old is an adult and is treated as such in all respects.

The same should be true inside the beltway. Ocasio-Cortez's age may be relevant to her electability or representation of her district (the median age in the Bronx is 31). It might give us insight into why she thinks as she does or help explain her public appeal. But it should have no bearing on our evaluation of her ideas.

A 29-year-old member of Congress (or a 37-year-old presidential candidate) deserves no special dismissal or praise, scrutiny or leeway for their age. I don't expect Trump to recognize this, but surely the rest of us can do better. In politics as in any other realm, we can learn to treat children as children and adults as adults.

The Sunday afternoon neighborhood Facebook drama started with a post of two photos. "Okay, I found this bone in an alley," the caption read. "This looks like part of a human femur, but I'm hoping to be wrong. Is there a dog chewing bone that look like this?"

There is indeed. The photos clearly showed an old beef knuckle, dirty and weathered, but easily identifiable for any owner of a large dog. Also, cows and people are not the same size — if this bone was human, it belonged to Goliath.

"Could be a dog bone," allowed the first comment, "but it also looks like human bone." The next four commenters agreed, recommending a call to the police and pleading for updates on the investigation. Some skeptics finally arrived to propose the beef knuckle solution, but an officer had already been summoned to the scene.

About 40 escalating comments deep, the thread was closed, but not before someone felt a need to suggest the bone was from a murder attributable not to the (majority white) neighborhood in which it was found, but rather to a "cold case" from the (majority minority) neighborhood a few blocks east. (Note: I live in Minnesota. Contra Fargo, there aren't lot of unsolved dismemberment cases around here.) Crime lab results are probably not forthcoming.

The Great Beef Knuckle Mystery of 2019 is Facebook neighborhood groups in a nutshell: Chatty drama, disagreements about dog waste, crime paranoia, and low-key (or, occasionally, not so low-key) racism are standard fare.

But for all their flaws, these groups (and their analogues on apps like Nextdoor) have their value. As often as they are weird or contentious, they are friendly and useful. Newcomers are heartily welcomed; recommendations for local shops and services are freely shared; desperate appeals for rescue when your car is stuck in the snow are speedily answered, often by total strangers.

While the umpteenth "gunshots or fireworks?" conversation on July 5 always threatens to change my mind, a reasonably healthy neighborhood group strikes me as an asset — not an ideal source of community connection, certainly, but far better than the silence its absence could produce.

I speak from the experience of membership in three such groups. One is a two-neighborhood buy/borrow/barter page where I have successfully rid myself of items including a box spring, fabric scraps, and dirt — yes, actual dirt — while acquiring Lincoln Logs, bikes, and slightly old lettuce for my guinea pigs to munch. The second is the group for my neighborhood proper. Until recently it was barely active, but now it buzzes with lost-and-found pets, community events, and frequent digital summonses of the local city council member to account for civic grievances large and small.

The third group, home of the Beef Knuckle Mystery, is by far the most entertaining. It's technically for the next neighborhood over, but dual membership is common, as both are small geographic areas and we share the buy/borrow/barter space.

This community is peak Facebook neighborhood group. The dog poop disposal debates have slowed of late, but the urban turkey sightings, requests for recommendations that have already been given a dozen times, and earnest pleas for all fireworks to be canceled on Independence Day because they make little Fluffy-Poo scared will surely never die. Each year has its recurring rhythm of topics: gardening in the spring; crime in the summer; Halloween in the fall; snow removal in the winter. Then there are the perennial favorites, like solicitations of advice for handling various vermin or inquiries into whether you should call the cops because a man you do not know has knocked on your front door.

This familiarity makes it no less odd to me that we've built an online community composed entirely of people already part of an actual, physical community. Why do we choose to have these conversations on Facebook when we could have so many of them in person? Why do we gather in a digital group instead of at the street corner or on someone's front porch?

Part of the answer is simple convenience and busyness: Facebook lets us participate in the neighborhood gossip from work or school or church or wherever. But I suspect there's also something bigger going on, that our decision to digitize neighborhood life is at least somewhat influenced by (and, in turn, influential for) declining levels of social trust, increasing feelings of loneliness and isolation, and the downward trend of community participation exhaustively detailed in Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone:

For the first two thirds of the 20th century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago — silently, without warning — that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from each other and from our communities. [Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone]

Perhaps we feel some lingering impulse or obligation to engage our neighbors, a holdover from a friendlier age, but we've lost (or never learned) the skills to do so in real life. A Facebook group can lower the barrier to interaction. It lets us check people out before risking an in-person meeting, and we can encounter a larger number of neighbors than we'd likely ever meet offline.

That's a good thing — and yet it must also be admitted that those encounters are typically shallow, that digital distance makes space for rudeness, even cruelty, we'd rightly quash during ordinary conversation, and that online interactions can become a replacement for real community life as much as they can be its support.

The Facebook neighborhood group is often amusing — my Sunday afternoon was decidedly enhanced by being able to laugh at the beef knuckle sleuths — but it is also a "good servant but a bad master." It should always be made to build the community it serves, never to subvert it.

This should not be surprising, as the independent senator from Vermont is hardly coy on this subject. He was particularly blunt in a 2015 conversation with Vox, insisting his democratic socialism does not entail advocacy of the "right-wing" "Koch brothers proposal," which Sanders argued would "make everybody in America poorer" and "[do] away with the concept of a nation-state."

Still, back on the campaign trail in Iowa on Sunday, Sanders again had to ward off the assumption that he's an open borders advocate. "I'm afraid you may be getting your information wrong. I think what we need is comprehensive immigration reform," he said, adding that though "there's a lot of poverty in this world," letting poor immigrants come to America en masse is not "something that we can do at this point."

Like most 2020 Democrats — the exhaustively detailed Andrew Yang aside — Sanders has yet to post a position statement on immigration (his Senate website also doesn't include immigration among "Bernie's Priorities"). But his Iowa comments are probably a representative ghost of immigration statements future: a dual rejection of both the Trump administration's cruelest tacticsand any truly significant liberalization of our immigration policies. And that's a shame, because serious 2020 contenders advocating something substantially different from the standard "comprehensive immigration reform" grab-bag would do our country a service.

As it is, the immigration debate among prominent Democratic candidates is looking pretty narrow. Some positions are nearly a universal given: Stop family separations. Stop putting kids in cages. Make Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) permanent, possibly through passage of the DREAM Act or something like it. Offer some sort of path to residency or citizenship for many immigrants already in the country illegally.

Beyond those, we can anticipate a fairly limited range of tweaks to the current system on the spectrum between, say, the labor nationalism of Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and the "country of immigrants" idealism of former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas). The median seems to be about where Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) lands with a call to "protect American workers in a global economy" while we "keep families together, create a pathway to citizenship, and enact comprehensive immigration reform."

Democrats seeking to peel away the sort of voter who backed former President Barack Obama in 2012 and President Trump in 2016 will lean more on the protecting U.S. workers side of things; those aiming to capture their party's left wing will focus more on immigrants' rights — especially widely popular rights (like DACA) for more sympathetic subsets of the immigrant population (like DREAMers and kids).

This approach isn't unreasonable, and it obviously boasts a good deal of strategic wisdom. Polling suggests Americans tend to favor DACA, skills-based admission, and a restricted path to citizenship while tending to oppose increased immigration rates, family-based admission, and mass deportation. The median position will be satisfactory for many voters, and the result will be immigration policy that is updated yet not terribly different from that of recent non-Trump presidencies.

But "satisfactory" is not the same as "good."

A strong campaign strategy has election as its primary goal — enacting humane and effective immigration policy is in this sense necessarily secondary. I say that not to impugn any of these candidates' sincerity about their immigration proposals but as a simple reflection of reality: What works on the campaign trail is not identical to what fosters a fruitful, creative debate that could produce a legitimately new and good immigration policy.

It's understandable that no viable contender wants to run an educational campaign where winning takes a back seat to raising policy awareness. Still, 2020 Democrats (plus any GOP challengers or high-profile independents) would perform a public service if they successfully broadened the immigration debate.

For as contentious as this topic is, our division is confined to a relatively small Overton Window, with most disagreement concerning enforcement technique (e.g. how and for how long should we detain migrant families?) rather than larger philosophical questions (like whether there is a right to live where you please, or whether open borders really "[do] away with the concept of a nation-state").

With his wall obsession, emergency declaration, and border closure proposal, Trump is doing his damnedest to open the window wider for restrictionist approaches. Insofar as he succeeds, even the median position will become less politically plausible unless a serious, national figure opens the window in the other direction, too. Useful proposals could come in many forms, though a practical plan for open borders (or something close to it) might be the most obvious option. Some of this could be as simple as developing a clever rebranding for old ideas suffering from negative associations and the fatigue of past debates.

A credible 2020 candidate would be an excellent window-opener, so as position statements are released, I will be on a hopeful lookout for something — anything — comparatively far from the median stance. It won't come from Sanders, certainly, but this is a big field. Maybe someone else will do us this kindness.

President Trump never talks softly, but he has a new big stick to carry in his fight for more restrictive immigration policies: closing the southern border.

"Congress must get together and immediately eliminate the loopholes at the Border!" Trump tweeted Wednesday. "If no action, Border, or large sections of Border, will close. This is a National Emergency!" The next day, switching focus from Congress to his dissatisfaction with Mexico's drug enforcement efforts, he suggested the closure would not happen until next year.

There are four times in recent history a president has ordered the southern border completely or significantly closed. Only one of those four cases is comparable to Trump's proposal here, and it was not a model to be imitated. On the contrary, a review of this brief history of border closures offers only fresh reason for skepticism of Trump's plan.

Two of the four past border closures were dramatically different from what Trump has in mind. In 1963, on order of the newly minted President Lyndon B. Johnson, the border was sealed to aid the capture of the late President John F. Kennedy's assassin. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and the proximity to Mexico raised worries the killer might try to flee the country. Mexico closed the border from its side as well. This dual closure did not last long, as suspect Lee Harvey Oswald was captured and then murdered within two days of JFK's death.

In 1985, then-President Ronald Reagan closed the southern border, again to deal with a specific crime, the abduction and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent named Enrique Camarena. This was not a complete closure; crossing the border was not impossible, merely very difficult because of the hours-long delays caused by U.S. border agents' manual searches of every vehicle coming through. It lasted about a week, beginning midway through the month-long gap between Camarena's disappearance and the discovery of his body.

The third closure is a little more like what Trump wants, but not much. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, then-President George W. Bush ordered searches of every car and pedestrian, much as Reagan had 16 years earlier. "Usually you cross pretty promptly — after 9/11 they went to this Level One Alert, and within about a day you had lineups of 12 to 18 hours at the borders," Edward Alden, a Council on Foreign Relations expert on migration, told CBS News. This delay "had an immediate effect in places like the auto industry. In a couple of days, GM and Ford were running out of parts they needed for production." Some of the new border security measures put in place as part of this closure were never relaxed.

Fourth is our sole close comparison. In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon launched "Operation Intercept," part of the nascent war on drugs. The aim was to stop marijuana imports from Mexico, and the method was a dramatic escalation of scrutiny applied at border checkpoints. As with the 1985 and 2001 closures, every vehicle was thoroughly searched, and some drivers were reportedly strip-searched. The operation began without prior announcement, leaving would-be border crossers stranded in line for hours in dangerously hot weather without air conditioning or adequate water.

For the Nixon administration, however, the border closure was successful — not in the ostensible aim of finding weed but as a means of coercion against the Mexican government. Mexico was previously an unwilling partner in the drug war, having responded to a Nixonian proposal of destroying marijuana fields by saying, albeit in "diplomatic language," that Washington should "go piss up a rope." The pain of border closure made Mexico more willing to give Nixon the cooperation he sought.

Half a century later, with 50 years of often morally monstrous failure of the drug war behind us — and marijuana on its way to national legalization — Nixon's strategy hasn't aged well. But even setting aside the drug policy specifics, border closure as an underhanded tool of presidential coercion should raise alarm.

Whether the target is a foreign country or opposition in Congress, the president should not be able to bring a major portion of the American and Mexican economies to a punishing halt just to get his way. It is entirely unacceptable to willfully cause large-scale economic turmoil and suffering for what amounts to a deceptive tantrum, especially when this coercion is implemented by an office constitutionally tasked with enforcing policy more than making it.

Trump's threat here has much in common with his emergency declaration to obtain funding for further border wall construction: Is it legal? Arguably yes, and it may well survive court challenge. But it is nonetheless ripe for abuse and grounded in a troubling disregard for constitutional separation of powers and diplomacy.

Border trade and transit are not a plaything to be tossed aside in a fit of pique or pursuit of demonstrably vain goals like ending drug traffic. Repetition of Nixon's coercive closure should be prohibited, not repeated.

You know the lies I mean. Not the lies of self-service, flattery, or malice. Those lies are frequent and reprehensible, but they at least have a certain logic: We can understand why Trump would lie to advance a policy aim, to undermine a political enemy or bolster a friend, to enhance his bank account, or to protect himself from legal trouble. We can grasp the rationale of those lies while opposing their use.

But then there are the other lies. The unutterably dumb lies. The pointless, easily disprovable lies that serve no obvious purpose. Like Trump's long and continuing obsession with crowd sizes, which he consistently falsifies despite photo evidence of the truth. Or his reported insistence to GOP donors that he did not say "Tim Apple" — a minor verbal flub, caught on camera, which no one would have cared about beyond a momentary giggle had Trump not fixated on denying it. Or consider this week's whopper, in which Trump claimed his father was born in Germany, when in fact it is well-established that Fred Christ Trump was born in New York. Trump has told this lie at least thrice — but why?

In fact, why tell any of these lies? Why launch, unprompted, into what appears to be a worse-than-useless falsehood that will inevitably come under public scrutiny and be quickly debunked? "I just thought, why would you lie about that," one donor said of the "Tim Apple" thing. "It doesn't even matter!"

Why, indeed? Here are six possible explanations.

1. Pride

This is not pride in its more positive sense — pride in your accomplishments, for example, or in the merits of your city or loved ones — but at its most destructive. In fact, it borders on delusion.

In this scenario, Trump describes the world as he wants it to be, and that crucially means describing himself as he wants to be (and to be seen). He responds to threats to his ego by saying what he wants to be true, regardless of reality.

So if the "first mission of any Trump lie is to make Trump himself look and feel better," and if his egotism is sufficiently monstrous, then no lie is too petty or pointless to skip. Trump draws the biggest crowds, did not say "Tim Apple," and was sired by a man born in Germany because that is what Trump wants. Affirming each falsehood is a moment of satisfaction, however fleeting, for his pride.

2. Habit

Trump lies significantly more often than the average American, and the pace of his lying has accelerated. Perhaps he lies because he lies — that is, he tells the purposeless lies because he tells so many purposeful ones. The habit of lying created by the explainable lies holds even when there is no useful lie to be told, so Trump fills the gap with a useless lie instead.

Related to habit is compulsion, which raises the subject of mental illness. And yes, some mental health professionals have argued Trump necessitates abandoning their field's longstanding ethics rules against diagnosing public figures from afar. Sociopathy, which is identified by traits including habitual deception and impulsiveness, is a common proposal for Trump. But as I am not a mental health professional, and I do see the wisdom in banning remote diagnoses, I'll stick with "habit" as an explanatory option here.

3. Camouflage

In this explanation, Trump lies incessantly so the little, pointless lies can provide cover for the big, important ones.

"We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear. In certain circumstances, that verification simply fails to take place," explains Maria Konnikova at Politico. One of those circumstances is a deluge of deception. "Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream," Konnikova continues:

When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything. It's called cognitive load — our limited cognitive resources are overburdened. It doesn't matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true. [Politico]

In a bizarre turn, one of Trump's former primary rivals, Rick Santorum, nearly used this explanation to defend the president's untruthfulness in a February appearance on CNN. Trump "doesn't tell the truth about a lot of things fairly consistently," Santorum said, so the "fact that he's not telling the truth about Russia fairly consistently, at least in the eyes of people around here, why is that any different?"

4. Power

Perhaps the point of the pointless lie is the lie itself, because lying is a way Trump exercises power. He lies because he can, because it is a constant opportunity to express and even enforce his will.

"If you are governed by a set of rules and laws, and then tell lies that enable you to break those rules and laws, the lies give you power," argues Lucian K. Truscott IV at Salon. "It's like you're standing astride the life of the nation and saying, 'I know I'm lying. You know I'm lying. I'm powerful, and you're not. F--- you.'"

5. Loyalty

Trump could also lie because his subordinates and supporters will loyally participate in his deception, and Trump is all about loyalty.

One way Trump requires his underlings to lie is lying himself, telling a falsehood they must then perpetuate. George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has theorized that this functions as a test of trust: "If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid." And beyond demonstrating loyalty, Cowen says, this forced deception actively cultivates it by making subordinates "grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command."

The loyalty explanation works with Trump's fans, too. Believing or pretending to believe — it doesn't really matter, psychologically — Trump's outrageous claims fosters a sense of in-group solidarity. It's a sign of tribalism, sort of like a secret handshake or codeword. Talking about how Trump had the biggest inauguration crowd of all time shows you're in, and whether you sincerely believe the crowd was record-setting is irrelevant.

Trump himself has come close to offering this explanation, telling ABC News he does not have to give evidence to back his unfounded claims about mass voter fraud because "many people feel the same way that I do. … [T]hey're saying 'We agree with Mr. Trump. We agree.' They're very smart people."

6. Time

This final option may be the least conscious and strategic of them all: Maybe Trump tells useless, obvious lies because it never occurs to him not to do so. And maybe it doesn't occur to him because he struggles to relate constructively to the past and future. He cannot think long-term, so he never considers that his lies will be found out in short order.

"Like my 92-year-old mom, Trump lives in a very small window of time, and no, I don't mean he lives 'in the moment' in that healthy, New-Age-y sort of way. I mean he has trouble looking backwards or forwards in time," suggests Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, at USA Today. Epstein goes on:

[Trump is] like a rudderless sailboat blown about by the wind, with the direction largely determined moment-to-moment according to who's got his attention and whether he views that person as friend or foe. […] Not only do his views shift, he also has no trouble denying, entirely without guile, in my view, what he said yesterday. All that's shiny and real to him is what friends or foes are saying inside those small time windows. Everything else is fuzzy, and that's why he can so easily tell so many lies. From his perspective, lying has no meaning. Only reacting has meaning. Trump reacts. [USA Today]

The ability to think beyond the present moment is a mark of adulthood, and this theory goes a long way toward explaining why Trump's pointless lies feel so childish. It's the behavior of a toddler unable to calculate likely consequences or account for relevant history when a lie slips off his tongue. All that matters is right now, and right now, the lie feels like the way to go.

Sometimes, as the leader of a global superpower, you very much want to coerce the behavior of another government, only to find your tedious public is not enthusiastic about the prospect of military intervention, probably because of the seven or so wars you're already fighting. A quandary!

Luckily for you, sanctions are a politically viable option instead. Especially when targeted at specific industries, state agencies, or officials, sanctions are cast as a shrewd and humane alternative to open conflict. We can make life difficult for corrupt politicians or halt oil sales or limit military build-up without hurting ordinary people, who likely have little control over their leaders' choices. All the coercion, none of the humanitarian consequences.

It sounds good in theory. It sounds clean and altruistic, foreign policy without the bloodshed. And though it's obviously true that sanctions do not mete out the direct damage of airstrikes or invasion, they are not the humanitarian alternative they're often made out to be. Even targeted sanctions can have grave unintended consequences for innocent civilians, as present circumstances in Iran and Venezuela reveal.

Drenched in heavy rains and spring snow melt, Iran is flooding. The country has suffered three major floods in the past two weeks, with 23 of 31 provinces affected as of this writing. Hundreds of villages and several cities are submerged. "In [the provincial capital city of] Khorramabad the water has risen by as much as three meters in parts," state media reported Monday, and some areas are "completely submerged with residents stranded on their rooftops." Tens of thousands of people have been displaced, and dozens have died.

The death toll could well grow, partly because international aid has been limited. "Two weeks into devastating floods that have caused tremendous losses and damages across Iran, there is still no report about other countries extending help," reports Radio Farda, a Persian-language subsidiary of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. To all appearances, "European states as well as Iran's neighbors, particularly the wealthy Persian Gulf states, have also not made any official offers of help," the story says, some Turkish charities excepted.

More help is not forthcoming, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, because "challenges caused by unilateral sanctions will affect the U.N. response and the accountability of the U.N. to deliver the appropriate support." The unilateral sanctions in question are those imposed by the Trump administration following President Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.

In a tweeted statement, Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, made the same charge more bluntly: Trump's sanctions are "impeding aid efforts by #IranianRedCrescent to all communities devastated by unprecedented floods," he said, an account the Red Crescent has confirmed, specifically pointing to limitations on Iranian access to the SWIFT banking system, through which the charity was previously transferring aid money to Iran. (Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday said support could be directed to Iran's Red Crescent through the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, but it is not clear how the transfer would happen in practice.) Zarif also claimed rescue helicopters are unable to reach flooding victims because sanctions have left Tehran's fleet in disrepair.

Half a world away, U.S. sanctions on Venezuela are indirectly worsening the chronic food shortages that are already starving Venezuelan children to death. "Though the United States was not responsible for the collapse of Venezuela's economy — that was a pure product of Hugo Chávez's potted version of socialism — the sanctions it imposed on Venezuelan oil in late January could compound the humanitarian crisis," explainsThe Washington Post's Jackson Diehl. Oil exports are Venezuela's "only significant source of hard currency," so as U.S. sanctions push export levels down, "Venezuelan imports of food and medicine, already disastrously insufficient, will drop off a cliff."

Removing these sanctions wouldn't magically restore Venezuela to abundance and stability — but neither will imposing them. Historically, sanctions have a pretty poor record of effectiveness. One study of 85 sanctions systems published inInternational Security identified just four successes. Sanctions are "not likely to achieve major foreign policy goals," the survey concluded, but they reliably "inflict significant human costs on the populations of target states, including on innocent civilians who have little influence on their government's behavior."

U.S. sanctions on Iran never forced Tehran to democratize, but they did prove deadly for Iranian innocents long before this spring's floods. And in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro has used U.S. pressure as propaganda to shore up his own power, depicting himself as a bulwark against the "imperialist" "gringos." What if the sanctions "plan doesn't work? Suppose the [Maduro] government holds on, and then you've duplicated the suffering and you haven't solved the problem," Crisis Group analyst Phil Gunson, who is based in Caracas, told the Miami Herald. "The prospect that it can be apocalyptic but not produce an outcome can be quite scary."

Sanctioning Venezuela's nationalized oil industry, which supports the Maduro regime, or limiting Iran's access to international financial institutions to discourage nuclear weapons development may sound like straightforward ways to coerce bad actors in these two countries without harming civilians. But the reality of sanctions isn't that simple. They're often unintentionally inhumane and rarely effective.

Sanctions may be a lesser evil than war, but that does not mean they cannot be cruel.

Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke officially launched his candidacy for the Democratic nomination by declaring to Vanity Fairhe is "just born to be in it." And his supporters seem to have picked up on the "chosen one" undertones already, with a sign at a Saturday night rally in Austin glorying, "BETO IS OUR CHRIST."

This is, of course, just one sign. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe a single, still image misrepresents the grimace of devotion on the sign-holder's face. Maybe he's not there to support O'Rourke but to embarrass him — the Trump 2020 flag in the background shows counter-demonstrators were on hand.

But maybe not, and maybe the fact that a "BETO IS OUR CHRIST" sign is plausible as a sincere statement of political enthusiasm should give us serious pause as we plunge into the 2020 race. Ours is a culture friendly to idolizing public figures, politicians very much included, and this campaign season will offer plenty of opportunity for such misguided worship. Next year will be a high holy year of American civil religion, one marked by the (political) death of many gods. We place our faith in them at our peril.

There is a sense, yes, in which this is nothing new: That sign-holding man in Austin did not invent political adoration. Former President Barack Obama's campaigns, for example, were known for their messianic themes, especially in 2008. Oprah Winfrey described him in the run-up to that year's primaries as a rare politician "who know[s] how to be the truth," which is difficult not to read as a reference to one of Jesus' most explicit claims of divinity.

But there are also at least three ways in which 2020 promises to take Americans' idolization of political leaders to fresh heights.

The first is structural. As the office of the presidency becomes ever more powerful and unbound by constitutional and social constraints, it is unsurprising to find Americans investing the role with salvific significance. When it seems the president can do anything he wants, it is natural to want him to do the anything you want. The modern Oval Office is the seat of unparalleled power, so it is foolish but not obviously irrational to believe that installing the right person is the solution to all our national woes. And absent dramatic reforms — which both parties extoll in the minority and abandon in the majority — the public conception of the president-as-savior, chosen to enact the hope of America, will continue to escalate alongside executive authority.

President Trump (and at least some of those jockeying to be his opposition) will further this dynamic by encouraging political idolatry from his fans. Trump's not the originator of our civil religion, but he has availed himself of it in unique ways. Think of how he demands intense personal loyalty; how he takes credit for the whole health of the economy ("the greatest jobs president God ever created"); how he dominates the news cycle and with it our mental real estate; how he declares himself the proper repository of our political faith ("I alone can fix it"); how he fixates on greatness.

All of this pushes us, regardless of political affiliation, to think of the presidency as a near-omnipotent determinant of our national fate. When you're electing a god, the stakes are high!

The second factor at play in 2020 (and beyond) is the decline of other outlets for our religiosity. Now you may believe, as I do, that those without substantive faith commitments are inclined to bring religious fervor to their politics because we are made to find meaning in community life and transcendent ritual, and the emptiness we feel without them is a "pointer to something other and outer." Or you may simply think our brains evolved for religiosity.

Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: As religious participation declines, political participation appears as the only large-scale alternative. It can offer religion-like feelings of belonging, service, and commitment to truth — or at least a temporarily functional facsimile. So we substitute state for church, voting for prayer, celebrity endorsers for clergy, and human props for saints as we pick our preferred deity on the ballot.

And this is not a phenomenon exclusive to the explicitly religiously unaffiliated. As Timothy P. Carney argues in a compelling county-level statistical analysis of 2016 primary results at The American Conservative, "Many of Trump's earliest and most dedicated supporters were seeking a deeper fulfillment" than surface-level pledges of factory jobs and restricted immigration: "[W]hen Middle America turned away from church, they were missing something. And they sought it in Trump," while staying nominally Christian.

The third reason 2020 will see Americans particularly prone to political idolatry is how the race has been widely cast as a "good vs. evil" fight where we decide "what kind of country we are." This too is not new, though the rhetoric does feel more dramatic than in most elections of recent history. The other two factors are feeders here: Growth of executive power means the president has real capacity to do evil, and religiosity in political zeal pushes us to seek alliance with an ultimate good. We are awarding a very large prize, and we want our decision to be judged on the right side of history.

The trouble with all this is that the imperial presidency is a hazard to be dismantled, not grasped; that flawed and finite politicians are always doomed to insufficiency as recipients of our hope and trust; and that settling into a stark, "good vs. evil" mindset with our political opponents — the family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors who vote differently than we do — makes it all but impossible to do anything but deepen that division, perhaps pushing them to reactively embrace the bad ideas we want them to abandon.

Beto is not your Christ. Neither is Trump, nor anyone else who runs for president. And that's true no matter how willing they may be to play that role or how good it may feel to let them play it. Political idolatry is a sure route to disappointment; your idol may look golden, but his feet are made of clay.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed his report, and President Trump is happily crowing about it on Twitter. "No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION," he wrote Sunday.

Not quite. As Attorney General William Barr's four-page summary noted, Mueller "did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election." So no collusion, sure — but Mueller "did not draw a conclusion ... as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction," Barr said. That ambiguity has led to speculation that Mueller believes obstruction did occur and should be addressed by Congress even if the evidence is insufficient for criminal trial.

Whatever happens with Congress, the prospect of obstruction of justice as a sole charge is worth examination, not so much because of Trump — though certainly the topic may soon be relevant to his political fates — but because of the countless Americans who find themselves facing similar "contempt of cop" charges without being able to tweet about it from the comfort of the Oval Office.

I'm thinking of people like an Arkansas man named Adam Finley, who was stopped by a police officer on suspicion of trespassing at the railroad yard where Finley worked. Body camera footage of the encounter shows the cop, Matthew Mercado, continually escalating the situation despite Finley's compliance and provision of an employee ID card demonstrating he had every right to be where he was. The immediate encounter ended without an arrest as Mercado finally had to accept Finley had done nothing wrong, but when Finley complained to Mercado's superiors, they responded by charging Finley for "refusal to submit" and "obstructing governmental operations."

"From what I saw, he's lucky he isn't going to jail," the police chief told Finley's wife. "Who? Adam?" she answered. "For what?" "Obstruction of justice," he replied. "He interfered with a law enforcement officer's investigation."

Finley was eventually acquitted on both counts — but why was he charged at all? This may seem like a particularly egregious case, and in some ways it was. But the decision to charge Finley for obstruction without charging him for any prior crime is not unusual. Contempt of cop charges — a colloquial category that can include things like resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, failure to obey a police order, fleeing police, and obstruction of justice — are often issued on a standalone basis.

The incongruity here should be obvious: Why charge and even arrest someone for resisting arrest if there was no reason to arrest them in the first place? Or how can you be guilty of obstructing justice if, like Finley, you never committed a crime for which justice needed to be obtained?

All too predictably, misuse of standalone contempt of cop charges are unevenly applied to minorities and the poor. A 2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencerinvestigation found Seattle police "citywide arrest people for obstructing — basically, the crime of getting in a cop's way — at a rate of more than one per day. But there are concentrations of obstruction arrests in pockets throughout the city," and officers "arrest African-Americans for the sole crime of obstructing — when it is not accompanied by an underlying charge — at a rate more than eight times as often as whites when population is taken into account."

Defense attorneys told the Post-Intelligencer this sort of charge is used to excuse police violence. Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper spoke in somewhat more measured terms, saying that when "police officers don't have a handy tool, a justifiable arrest, they look for ways to establish probable cause." Provoking an outburst can be used to rationalize an obstruction arrest, which opens the door to further investigation.

Another former Seattle cop who commented on condition of anonymity was more explicit: "It is unequivocally the biggest bullsh-t arrest in the Seattle Police Department," he said, a "catchall that cops used when they get pissed off at a 'suspect' or a 'suspect's friends.'"

That description certainly seems to fit the circumstances of Johanna Pagan-Alomar, a Bronx woman who lost her left eye after she was beaten by a New York City police officer who allegedly held a key between her fingers as she battered Pagan-Alomar's face. The beating occurred after Pagan-Alomar saw a friend being arrested in the street and asked the police what was happening. The officer responsible was cleared in a departmental probe, and Pagan-Alomar — who was under no suspicion of involvement in her friend's alleged crime — was arrested for three contempt of cop charges: assault, harassment, and obstruction. Video of the incident shows she at most tapped the cop's shoulder.

This sort of thing is not confined to Arkansas, Seattle, and New York. It happens in Los Angeles, where police tased a homeless man and arrested him for resisting arrest after he declined to move his tent. A subsequent report by the Los Angeles Police Department's inspector general found one in three LAPD arrests for resisting arrest were unjustified.

It happens at festivals and protests, where police can use these charges to take the loud, drunk, or rude into custody without bothering to identify any more concrete criminal behavior. A case concerning such an arrest at Alaska's Arctic Man festival is presently under Supreme Court review.

It happens in Louisiana, where a young black man stopped for a broken taillight was violently beaten by multiple officers because he ostensibly "resisted arrest" — for no crime at all. It happened in Massachusetts to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. It happened in Texas to Sandra Bland, the young black woman found hanged in a jail cell after police escalated a routine traffic stop into a contempt of cop arrest.

Now, perhaps, it will happen to Trump — albeit without the criminal case or threat of jail time faced by the hoi polloi. Unfortunately, the conversation around Trump's situation seems unlikely to focus where it ought: on the legitimacy of obstruction as a standalone charge.

Instead, Trump's camp has already made the absurd argument that nothing the president can do could "constitute obstruction because that would amount to him obstructing himself." Being president does not put one above the law, and obstruction is a charge perhaps most appropriate when applied to government officials concealing misconduct from the public, if in fact such misconduct occurred.

Meanwhile, critics like New York magazine's Jonathan Chait contend Trump cannot be considered exonerated partly on the erroneous grounds that the innocent "make displays of cooperation with investigators." The innocent, as I've previously written, are best advised to uncooperatively shut the hell up. (In the words of Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg and the only person in history to serve as a Supreme Court justice, U.S. solicitor general, and U.S. attorney general: "Any lawyer worth his salt will tell [a] suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to police under any circumstances.")

Anyway, neither of these points pertain to the discussion we should be having, which is about whether standalone contempt of cop charges can be considered reasonable or just. This matters not so much for Trump personally — he is already the beneficiary of unique protections, and the standards for impeachment are rightly not the same as those for criminal prosecution — but because his circumstances happen to be drawing attention to a systemic problem in our justice system. It matters for people like Adam Finley, Johanna Pagan-Alomar, and Sandra Bland.

It has been nearly a year since two Blockbuster stores in Alaska shut down, leaving a solitary location in Bend, Oregon, as the chain's final storefront — and that lonely outpost continues to fascinate. It's now the subject of a forthcoming documentary and a business-sustaining streak of nostalgia tourism.

I miss video stores, too, though my pining isn't for Blockbuster's blue and yellow. We had an account there when I was in elementary school, but my formative video rental years were in high school and on summers home from college, when I patronized a mom-and-pop shop in walking distance from my house.

Going to the video store was a careful ritual that shaped almost every weekend. Speed was crucial, and stakes were high. Arrive too late or choose too recklessly and your entire weekend entertainment agenda unraveled. The weighty moment of a Friday night rental decision would determine the 48 hours to come, demanding what felt — at 15, anyway — like painstaking exercise in willpower and calculation of future feelings.

Our local video store crammed thousands of titles into a small storefront, priding itself on range of selection over Blockbuster's gleaming, homogenous rows of new releases. Where the big chains would bring in 20 or 40 copies of a popular movie, our video store might offer three or four. This limit was offset by an analogue reservation system involving clipboard lists and voicemails, but for the immediate weekend, missing those four copies meant missing that movie.

Victory required strategy. It was wise to arrive as early as possible, especially if aiming for a particular title. (A Main Street lined with minivans come straight from after-school sports was always a bad sign.) Once inside, a possessive approach to browsing was prudent: If you thought you might want a movie, you'd physically carry it around while making up your mind. Obnoxious and petty, sure, but the disappointment of seeing your selection snatched away at the last moment made the tactic obligatory.

Then there were the budgetary decisions. We rented movies using money from our spare change jar, which on a typical week generated enough for one new release or three older movies — but not both. Rare was the single film that could alone outweigh the lure of six to nine hours of entertainment in the pre-binge era, and the quest for a well-balanced trio that could survive parental scrutiny lead me to a thorough examination of every genre on offer. I worked my way through 1940s drama, 1950s musicals, 1980s camp comedy, and 1990s rom-coms, developing an equal devotion to Monty Python and Fiddler on the Roof.

My teenage film tastes were eclectic — in fact, far more so than my tastes are now, a time in which I am seriously contemplating whether it is too soon to watch the entirety of 30 Rock for the fourth time. In theory, the instant availability of endless streaming options ought to make me more adventurous, a movie omnivore. Between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube, I can watch just about anything I want at anytime, anywhere, and on any screen I want.

There is something deeply tedious about browsing from my couch, clicking right, right, right to see what else the algorithm imagines I'll like. Were I doing my high school movie exploration today, I would never come across titles as different as Ed Wood and The Bells of St. Mary's, or Down with Love and The Thin Red Line. I would never burrow that deep in the digital rabbit hole.

Gone is the chance meetcute with some hitherto unknown flick, the "Wait, what was that?" on the way up to the checkout counter. Comparison is difficult — there is no Netflix counterpart to holding two VHS boxes next to each other, studying the back matter for some definitive insight. Video store picks were a commitment built on meticulous scrutiny and schedule, so a movie that started slow or otherwise failed to immediately appeal could not be lightly abandoned. Now, the ability to instantly drop anything I don't like is a constant temptation. I can click "back" at any moment, though more often I never click "play" in the first place.

Instead of movies, these days I watch and re-watch a narrow roster of TV shows, almost all on the clever side of comedy or the lighthearted edge of drama. After the initial vetting process, these become signposts of easy familiarity in a limitless array of options I have no compelling incentive to inspect.

The online video store never closes, has infinite copies of everything, and is never crowded with soccer moms. There's no rush. There's no ritual. I don't need any strategy to pick. I don't need to pick at all.

"We are. We are. We're thinking about doing it very seriously," President Trump told Breitbart News in an interview published Tuesday. The "it" in question is designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations, a move Trump said his administration has "been thinking about ... for a long time." The shift would be "psychological, but it's also economic," Trump rambled on. "As terrorists — as terrorist organizations, the answer is yes. They are."

Except legally, they aren't. Our government defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents," and though the State Department's criteria for designating Foreign Terrorist Organizations is slightly broader, it still involves that element of political coercion. Drug cartels do terrible things, and terrorists sometimes sell drugs, but a drug cartel is not committing terrorism if it is acting for profit rather than politics.

That detail is unlikely to deter Trump from moving forward with the terrorist designation if he so chooses — and really, why would it? This sort of mission creep, in which law enforcement programs originally justified on national security grounds are repurposed for the drug war, is nothing new. Our government made a habit of finding all sorts of unexpected uses for powers and privileges it insisted were strictly to keep us safe from terror.

The Patriot Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, made this transition quite quickly. By 2003, The New York Timesreported the Bush administration had "begun using the law with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism," including "suspected drug traffickers." Federal officials told the Times they were "simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals," hastening to note they sometimes also used them for, you know, actual terrorists.

A decade later, an analysis from the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed that was only technically true. The "sneak-and-peek" searches the Patriot Act authorized — which don't require investigators to inform their target they are under scrutiny — rapidly changed from an option for exceptional circumstances to a routine investigative procedure. The searches were also overwhelmingly unconnected to the war on terror: In 2013, for example, 9,401 of 11,129 sneak-and-peak requests dealt with drug cases. Just 51 — less than 1 percent of the total — concerned suspected terrorism.

"Assume that any power you grant to the federal government to fight terrorism will inevitably be used in other contexts," The Washington Post’s Radley Balko wrote at the time. "Assume that the primary 'other context' will be to fight the war on drugs."

The same can often be said of measures to fight violent crime more broadly. SWAT teams, initially designed to deal with dangerous hostage and barricade situations, are now regularly used for more mundane purposes. Today, only 7 percent of SWAT raids are used to address the dangers they were created to combat. About two-thirds are used to fight the war on drugs.

This drug war mission creep also moves in the opposite direction. USA Todaybroke the news in 2015 that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) secretly tracked the metadata for billions of Americans' international phone calls beginning under the first Bush administration about a decade before the 9/11 attacks. The program operated without court approval — in fact, DEA agents actively concealed their surveillance activity to keep it out of public record — and "provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed." Predictably, drug warriors would later be among the federal agencies asking the NSA for access to its spy data.

Likewise, the Trump administration has repeatedly cited drug trafficking among its reasons for border wall construction. In his State of the Union address this year, the president pitched funding the wall as an opportunity for "Congress to show the world that America is committed to ending illegal immigration and putting the ruthless coyotes, cartels, drug dealers, and human traffickers out of business." On the campaign trail, Trump said the wall would "stop the drugs" and help him "get all of the drug lords, all of the bad ones." In reality, it will do no such thing. If anything, the wall could make the illegal drug trade more lucrative than it already is.

The war on drugs has a convenient malleability that allows it to both leech off other expansions of the security state and be used to justify them. Its consistent ineffectiveness offers unscrupulous politicians a perpetual bugbear, always ready to dance to the tune of whatever new policing technology or authority is desired. It is ripe for abuse.

The ideal solution here would be to end the drug war entirely, but failing that, narrow and more explicitly restrictive national security and law enforcement legislation would be a good start. "Always assume that when a law grants new powers to the government, that law will be interpreted in the vaguest, most expansive, most pro-government manner imaginable," as Balko advises, and try to head off any drug war mission creep before it begins to ooze.

Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chair, faced his second of two rounds of sentencing Wednesday for convictions stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. For crimes including financial fraud, tax evasion, witness tampering, and unregistered lobbying, Manafort will collectively serve about seven and a half years in prison. This is far lower than the two decades Mueller recommended, but it could still see Manafort, 69, spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Desperate Housewives actress Felicity Huffman was among several dozen wealthy parents charged for alleged bribery and deception to scam their kids' way into elite universities. Huffman was arrested at gunpoint and only released from federal custody after she ponied up for $250,000 bail.

Neither of these are very sympathetic people. They stand accused of markedly off-putting crimes, offenses that smack of corruption, elitism, and a thoroughgoing disregard for fairness and due process, whether in government or college admissions. But neither is accused of violent crimes. No one imagines Manafort or Huffman poses an immediate danger to the community. So why should they be locked up?

This is not the same question as, "Why should they be punished?" Manafort will pay a $50,000 fine and $24 million in restitution. It is far too early to say what will happen in the college scam cases, but financial punishments are plausible there, too. Assuming fair convictions, this sort of consequence seems appropriate, as other restitution- and rehabilitation-focused sentences — like some sort of community service — might be.

But prison time is not appropriate. Whether you agree with me here has a lot to do with how you'd describe the purpose of prison: If it is merely a site of revenge and retribution, simple infliction of suffering on those who have done wrong, then lockup might seem perfectly fitting for Manafort, Huffman, and other nonviolent offenders. But if, as I suspect most would say, prison is also about deterrence, rehabilitation, and public safety, the case for incarcerating nonviolent offenders begins to unravel.

There are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States. Our country alone accounts for 22 percent of the world's prisoners, though we represent less than 5 percent of the global population. Of those 2.3 million, 910,000 — fewer than half — have been convicted of violent crimes like murder, rape, and assault.

Another 465,000 are held in local jails without having been convicted of any crime. Their median detention time nationwide is 68 days, more than enough time for even the innocent to lose their jobs, homes, and custody of their children, all likely outcomes when nine in 10 of those held in pre-trial detention are jailed not because they are dangerous but because they are poor.

Yet of greatest concern to this discussion are the 849,000 in custody for nonviolent offenses. Some of these crimes might be subject to legitimate public safety concerns, but many of them — especially drug offenses, immigration violations, white collar crimes, and low-level public order or traffic offenses — clearly are not.

Research indicates incarcerating these nonviolent offenders does not lead to greater public safety or lower crime rates. So far from preventing recidivism, time in prison may have a criminogenic effect, meaning incarceration leads to a higher likelihood of further lawbreaking when the punishment is complete. Locking up nonviolent offenders is enormously costly to taxpayers, who pay about $31,000 per year to detain a single prisoner, and it offers markedly poor value for the money.

We are incarcerating more people for longer stretches of time for no good reason, and though lessening sentences for violent crimes will probably always be a contentious and difficult question, with nonviolent offenses there should be no such hang-ups.

PollingsuggestsmanyAmericansagree. Indeed, the most frequent objection I've seen raised to the idea that people like Manafort and Huffman should not be incarcerated is that it is unfair to let them off without prison time when poor and minority defendants convicted of nonviolent offenses will receive no such consideration. Why should the president's former campaign chair escape prison when Robert Spellman is serving 20 years for stealing $600 worth of cigarettes? Or why should a famous actress avoid incarceration when Latasha Wingster got two years for shoplifting $15 worth of wine coolers?

The wealthy, white, and well-connected, "shouldn't be the only ones to receive leniency and mercy from the criminal justice system," explains Georgetown law professor and former jailhouse lawyer Shon Hopwood. "At the same time, we don't want to level up all punishments." The search for justice should drive us to oppose unnecessary incarceration, especially for the most vulnerable, not to demand harsher sentences for the privileged as a sort of perverse equity. The goal should be reducing unjustified imprisonment for all, not spreading the harm around.

Tucker Carlson was caught, in his telling, "saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago."

The naughtiness in question was not a single something but a litany of execrablecomments about women ("they're extremely primitive; they're basic; they're not that hard to understand"), Hillary Clinton ("so strongly anti-penis"), teenage girls' sexual experimentation ("If it weren't my daughter, I would love that scenario"), the ideal immigrant ("Be hot, be really smart"), Iraq ("a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys"), and more.

Carlson responded with a brief refusal to "express the usual ritual contrition" which he expanded into a monologue on his Monday night show, casting himself as the latest victim of "the great American outrage machine." Once the machine takes you as its grist, Carlson said, it's "pointless to try to explain how words were spoken in jest, or taken out of context, or in any case bear no resemblance to what you actually think or would want for the country." Because the reality, Carlson argued, is the machine's product is partisanship, not principle. Its operators' goal is not to defend what is true or good but to ruin his career. The left is a hypocritical horde using morality as a pretense to suppress ideological dissent, and Tucker Carlson, for one, will "never bow to the mob. Ever. No matter what."

For this stand Carlson has been widely praised by his supporters, winning applause for "blast[ing] the left for their blatant hypocrisy," for "giv[ing] 'em hell," for rejecting progressives' "feigned" and "giddy" horror over "a quick guffaw" in an "informal setting."

But such praise is its own pretense, conflating two very separate issues: Whether Carlson's critics are in the wrong is one thing; whether he is also in the wrong is quite another.

Let’s consider the latter first. "You sometimes hear modern progressives described as 'new Puritans,'" Carlson said in his Monday monologue. "That's a slur on colonial Americans. Whatever their flaws, the Puritans cared about the fate of the soul and the moral regeneration of their society." Progressives do not care about those subjects, Carlson said, suggesting in unspoken contrast that he very much does.

In that case, here is an opportunity for Carlson to publicly model the faith and morality he acclaims. Whatever the motives of the "outrage machine" — and I'll come back to that in a moment — the moral quality of this "something naughty" remains the same. The need for repentance, for repudiation of these words and a turn to a better course for "the fate of the soul," remains the same. That the comments were made about a decade ago makes no difference; the passage of time does not grant absolution. And the public nature of the original remarks means a public contrition is probably appropriate.

Carlson's monologue suggests he was somehow misrepresented, that a joke has been taken too seriously, or that he is being tarred for old views he no longer holds. The first two are impossible to credit: This is not a case of unproven allegations, a contextless quote, or grotesquerie that lives in the eye of the beholder. Whatever we think of the ethics of digging up old tapes like this, the fact is we have the tapes. The full context is clear. We know what was said and who said it.

These are words Tucker Carlson between the ages of 36 and 41 thought it was fitting to say to the world. And it is not very difficult, as an adult of reasonably good character, to avoid saying things like this in public. It is not very difficult to decline to go on radio shows where things like this are encouraged. No, there isn't any misrepresentation here; "out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks." If this is no longer what is in his heart, let him say so. (Carlson describes himself as a conservative Episcopalian who "love[s] the liturgy." His church's Book of Common Prayer is bursting with resources to guide repentance.)

Now, about that outrage machine and Carlson's critics, audience, and employer. Should he lose his job over this? I don't know. I can see the reason in arguments for and against it. Realistically, whether Carlson stays or goes, his commentary hour will be filled with the same sort of content, and Carlson will continue to be a popular pundit on Fox or off. The crowd cheering him now will stay his crowd even if he's ousted. Fox knows this, and, as there is no suggestion of prosecutable behavior, will probably keep Carlson around.

The more practically important topic, then, is the critics: Is this all just dirty politics, with unethical muckrakers digging through Carlson's archives out of partisan spite? No, not entirely. There are plenty who do sincerely care about the principles here.

But there is a reason Carlson's "outrage machine" plaint resonates so widely. We are, as a culture, addicted to conflict, ever eager to escalate and see our political enemies suffer. We arefixated on public shame, shuffling those we condemn into a permanent "bad person" category from which it is very difficult to exit, even after real change. We areprone to disproportionate reactions, including where outrage is concerned. And Twitter is indeed poisonous.

"In America's digital culture, outrage is packaged to almost every niche in the citizenry. People feel a 'duty' to be outraged by the offenses being trotted out," writes Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic. "And when so much is treated as outrageous, a culture loses the ability to focus on the ills that matter or even to easily describe why they are truly outrageous."

Where Carlson and his backers go wrong in their complaint about outrage culture is twofold: their insistence that it is only a creature of the left, and their sleight of hand to avoid dealing with the principle of the thing once they have denounced the other side's partisanship. Carlson himself traffics in outrage as much as any commentator on cable news, and the left-wing Media Matters, the organization that unearthed the radio clips, is mirrored on the right by the Media Research Center. Opposition research is not unique to one side or the other; just last month we were debating the political future of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) on the basis of a report from a conservative site called Big League Politics.

Recognizing this complicity on his own side, of course, would require a very different response from Carlson than the one he has chosen. If he really wanted to de-escalate, he would not fight outrage with outrage. And that, unlike his radio remarks, might actually get him booted from Fox.

"Think about it," Fox News host Jeanine Pirro asked viewers of her Saturday night show: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) "wears a hijab, which, according to the Quran, 33:59, tells women to cover so they won't get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?"

Pirro's remarks drew prompt uproar, including among her colleagues at Fox. The network issued a statement of emphatic condemnation, and Pirro herself shared a weaselly non-apology. "I've seen a lot of comments about my opening statement from Saturday night's show and I did not call Rep. Omar un-American," she said. "My intention was to ask a question and start a debate, but of course because one is Muslim does not mean you don't support the Constitution."

The implication of conflict between Islam and the Constitution was indisputably part of Pirro's original rant, but she's right she never made the claim explicit. Her suggestion was a little narrower: Anyone who is devoutly Muslim enough to wear a hijab probably isn't a good American. Be Muslim, sure, Pirro's words allow, but keep it out of sight. If you're bringing it into the public square — if you're making us remember it every time we look at you — well, that's a little much.

It's a strange point from a pundit who works the front lines of the "war on Christmas," bemoaning a "growing anti-Christian bias in America" and noting the First Amendment "doesn't give you freedom from religion," even in public life. But perhaps that contradiction shouldn't be surprising, as Pirro's comments exemplify the difficulty Americans have with religion in public discourse. She's not alone in failing to negotiate this relationship well — we are bad at this across the political spectrum — though her particular brand of failure is distinctive to the right.

Religion in public did not always present such a problem in American politics. Ours has never been a religiously homogenous nation, and our history of religious tolerance for minority faiths is far from consistent. But past eras were marked by a shared religious vocabulary among the majority (or rather, the majority of those allowed to participate in politics) that no longer exists.

Christendom is done. The public sphere is increasingly secularized and fragmented. Our civil religion is as poisonous and pervasive as ever, but in official contexts it is increasingly nonsectarian. Religion is daily at the forefront of political discourse — and polling suggests most of us wantto talk about religion publicly — but it navigates that position awkwardly, grappling with what Charles Taylor in A Secular Age terms an "expressivist dispensation," where we can no longer assume our public conversation partners generally believe and value the same things we do.

We cannot talk the way we used to, and we don't know how we should talk instead. Be religious, sure, but should you keep it out of sight?

The right has tended to answer that question with an energetic "no." On Fox, this looks like Pirro and her fellow talking heads raising endless alarm about the looming threat of godless, progressive Philistines who want to smash up your nativity set and force American Christians to privatize their faith and sublimate its dictates to meet the ruthless standards of political correctness. Off Fox, the answer takes more thoughtful forms, as in Rod Dreher'sBenedict Option, which proposes for Christians a "strategic withdrawal" from an increasingly hostile public, "to regain focus and clarity, and strengthen ourselves so that when we go back into the public square, we know who we are, what we stand for, and what we must endure for the sake of the true faith."

But while Dreher specifically has considered that American Jews and Muslims may need a similar strategy to stay visibly faithful in the face of public disdain, too many on the right take Pirro's course instead, adamantly defending public faith only for themselves. In theory, as Pirro protested, they have no problem with the public expression of unfamiliar types of faithfulness. But in practice, there is little comfort with adherents of any non-Christian religion (Judaism possibly excepted) actually availing themselves of the invitation to open religiosity in public life. This discomfort is not universal, but it is real.

The left's failings are of a different sort. Some do seek an American laïcité to exclude religious reasoning and conviction from public discourse. At its crudest, this is the cry of, "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries." In a more sophisticated form, it's philosopher Richard Rorty's argument that religious ideas have no place in public because "in political discussion outside the relevant religious community they are a conversation-stopper." For those not part of any given faith, faith-based claims are inherently irrelevant, Rorty says, and we should excise them from the public sphere so universally accessible debate can more quickly produce secular consensus and legislation.

Others on the left take a different tack, wanting to respect and include religion in public conversation because it is part of many people's identities. But this respect and inclusion often seems more willingly offered when the recipient religion has no real political power: It is easier to celebrate visible religiosity from Rep. Omar than, say, from a white, male, Republican Southern Baptist. Even if Pirro's calumny were true, Omar would have no way to substitute Islamic law for the Constitution. Our Southern Baptist, however, might successfully install a 10 Commandments statue at the courthouse or a creche on the town lawn.

None of these approaches are terribly functional, but they are especially bad in clashing combination. Religious conversationalists rightly feel it unfair to be asked to conceal their faith for public debate, while the nonreligious or otherly religious cannot fathom why they are supposed to give ear to the reasoning of a faith they do not share. Layering on hypocrisy, whether in the form of defending open religiosity only for one's own or lauding it only when it poses no real challenge to secularity, makes the dysfunction worse.

Far better would be something like what philosopher Jurgen Habermas proposes, in which religious expression is welcomed in the public sphere — but with the knowledge that it will be unpersuasive for many audiences, and that any decisions it helps inspire will be "translated to a generally accessible language before they can find their way" into law. As Habermas concludes, this approach ensures "all legally enforceable and publicly sanctioned decisions can be formulated and justified in a universally accessible language without having to restrict the polyphonic diversity of public voices at its very source."

Pirro should not succeed in her ostensible goal to "ask a question and start a debate" about whether hijabi women can support the Constitution. But her comments should start a different debate, spurring us to a search for better ways of dealing with religion when we talk in public.

An hour and a half into his record-long speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), President Trump turned his roving attention to the upcoming Senate vote to block his emergency declaration to obtain funding for border wall construction. The measure has already passed the Democrat-controlled House, and the Senate is required to take it up by March 15.

Trump's case for getting his way was simple: Democrats will abuse executive power if given the chance, so he should get to do it too. And judging from the likely fate of the suspension resolution — passage in the Senate, mortal wounding by veto, death in the House — this is a case most congressional Republicans accept.

Everyone is corrupt, their vote for Trump's emergency tacitly declares, so why shouldn't Republicans do what they can to get theirs? "The fate of the fool will overtake me also," they say with the disillusioned thinker of Ecclesiastes. "What then do I gain by being wise?"

It's not an easy question to answer compellingly. Procedural stickling pales into grayscale in the face of a fantastical policy win, and delayed gratification is no small request in Washington. But however alluring taking Trump's easy road may be, this blatant rejection of the rule of law is shortsighted, petty, and wrong. If not stymied in the courts, it will play out in developments to which GOP lawmakers will rightfully object, but — as these things usually go — they will not be the ones bearing the brunt of those consequences.

For Trump and his backers in Congress are correct, of course, that Democrats will abuse executive power when they can. As I wrote during the Obama years, before a Trump presidency was a twinkle in his golden rat's nest, there is no partisan monopoly on corruption, no R or D stamp of guarantee to ensure power, once acquired, will not be misused. Former President Barack Obama's hypocrisy on this point was particularly galling after his emphatic campaign-trail condemnations of executive overreach and constitutional abrogation — just as Republicans' newly open embrace of the unfettered presidency is pathetic and embarrassing after their years of complaining about Obama's imperium.

Contrary Trump, recognition of Democrats' past and probable future failings here is no argument for Republicans making matters worse. It is the very opposite, a blaring caution that each expansion of power one party seizes for itself will in due course be exploited and escalated by the other in an endless cycle of increasing lawlessness and decreasing accountability to the public.

Yes, this is a difficult lesson. Yes, sticking to this stuff means you don't get your exciting policy agenda enshrined in law without delay or compromise. Yes, you'll miss opportunities to pass bills and build walls you may sincerely believe are the shrewd and ethical choice. But rule of law is worth it anyway. A "government of laws and not of men" is not sexy, but it's miles better than the alternative.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about all this is it's not as if we have no Cassandra. Warnings about the dangerous precedent Trump's emergency will set are plentiful — indeed, the president acknowledged as much in his comments at CPAC. "A lot of people talk about precedent," he said. "That if we do this, the Democrats will use national emergency powers for something that we don't want." Trump continued:

They're going to do that anyway, folks. The best way to stop that is to make sure that I win the election. That's the best way to stop that. They're going to do it anyway. They'll do it anyway. I watch good people — they're friends of mine — [say,] "We're very concerned with setting precedent." […] I'm very concerned with having murderers and drug traffickers, and drugs and drug cartels, pouring into our country. That's what I'm concerned about. And the Democrats, they're going to do whatever they do if they get into power, and it won't have a damn thing to do with whether or not we approve our national emergency. [President Trump]

Trump must have known, when he spoke at CPAC, that the resolution to block his emergency will pass in the Senate with several Republicans — as of this writing, Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rand Paul (Ky.), and Thom Tillis (N.C.) — voting against the president's plan. That leaves up to 49 other GOP senators plus 182 of 197 House Republicans whose endorsement of the emergency is an implicit endorsement of Trump's myopic imprudence.

But as Paul argued in an op-ed explaining his vote, "the only way to be an honest officeholder is to stand up for the same principles no matter who is in power." That Democrats are "going to do it anyway" is no excuse for Republicans to make it easier for them. And re-electing Trump, supposing that's something you want, is no mitigating factor. Four more years is not a long time. Even the most enthusiastic Trump supporter cannot imagine Obama will be the last Democrat to sit in the Oval Office.

The warning about rule of law which Trump & co. reject here is not new. It is not particularly difficult to realize. That does not make it any less correct.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) officially launched his presidential campaign in his hometown of Brooklyn on Saturday.

"Thank you all for being part of a political revolution which is going to transform America," he told a crowd of supporters. "No, no, no, it is not Bernie, it is you. It is us together," Sanders continued as the crowd began chanting his name.

"And I want to thank you for being part of a campaign which is not only going to win the Democratic nomination, which is not only going to defeat Donald Trump — who is the most dangerous president in modern American history — but with your help we are going to transform this country and finally create an economy and a government which works for all of us, not just the 1 percent."

Sanders announced his candidacy for the 2020 Democratic primary in February and is scheduled to make his next campaign stop in Chicago on Sunday, where he is expected to discuss how his upbringing and education shaped his political views. Other major Democratic candidates include Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.).

Instead of major annual exercises, the officials said, U.S. and South Korean forces will cooperate on smaller, less costly training projects. "The U.S. has identified ways to mitigate potential readiness concerns by looking at required mission tasks versus having to conduct large-scale exercises," one official told NBC.

The large-scale exercises were suspended last year after President Trump promised to stop the "provocative" war games during his first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Another set of drills was canceled in October to further diplomatic progress with Pyongyang.

The immediate context of Trump's tweet is his loss of a 2015 court battle with Scotland over plans for a new offshore wind farm. Trump unsuccessfully sought to block construction of the turbines, arguing they would spoil the view from his golf course.

On Thursday, a court ruled Trump's company must pay for the Scottish government's legal fees incurred in the suit, so yeah, the U.K. probably is pretty happy about the golf course right now.

More broadly, the tweet is a reminder Trump chose not to divest ownership of his businesses when he took office, and he has continued to promote his properties as president. As Trump has noted, divestment is not legally mandatory, though it was customary for modern presidents.

Trump's decision has been subject to considerable scrutiny, including a lawsuit alleging he has violated the Constitution's emoluments clause — which bans the president from accepting gifts from foreign heads of state absent congressional consent — by doing business with foreign governments.

It sounds like a set-up for a knockoff of comedian Dave Chappelle's Clayton Bigsby character — the blind white supremacist who does not realized he is himself black — but James Hart Stern's takeover of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) is entirely serious.

Stern, who is African-American, is an activist in California who leads a group called Racial Reconciliation Outreach Ministries. He was contacted by former NSM president Jeff Schoep in 2014, Stern toldThe Washington Post, and the two men began speaking regularly. "From day one, I always told him: 'I don't agree with you; I don't like you,'" Stern said in his Post interview. "I talked to him because I wanted to hope to change him."

Schoep did not change his views, but he did get scared he'd be held accountable for the criminal actions of NSM members, most pressingly via a lawsuit alleging the group conspired to commit violence at 2017's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Early this year, Stern was able to convince Schoep to give him legal control over NSM.

In his new role as leader of the neo-Nazi group, Stern has asked a Virginia court to find NSM guilty in the Charlottesville suit. He does not plan to disband the organization, lest its several dozen members simply reform under a different name. Instead, he intends to work with Jewish groups to transform the NSM website to educate members on the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

"I did the hard and dangerous part. As a black man, I took over a neo-Nazi group and outsmarted them," Stern said of his project so far. "My plans and intentions are not to let this group prosper. It's my goal to set some hard records right." Read the full Post story here.

President Trump loves to boast of his popularity among Republican voters, and he is quite right that his approval ratings within his own party are consistently high. Support for Trump among self-identified Republicans has slipped below 80 percent for only a single week since he took office, and it regularly gets into the low 90s.

With numbers like these, the president has good reason to feel confident he'll win the GOP nomination again in 2020. However abysmal his broader approval rating and however small Republican voting ranks have become, these are the people who will vote in the GOP primaries, and they seem set to overwhelmingly pick Trump. Any primary challenger will almost certainly lose.

But that doesn't make such a challenge useless — far from it. Recent presidential history suggests a serious primary challenger, though doomed to fail, could guarantee Trump goes down, too.

Since 1950, 12 incumbent presidents have sought re-nomination and re-election. (Trump in 2020 will be the 13th.) Of that dozen, only two were not nominated again: Harry Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Both had low approval ratings within their own party — a mere 44 percent of Democrats approved of Truman heading into the New Hampshire primary, and Johnson barely scraped together majority support at 54 percent — which makes them poor comparisons for Trump, who is poised to go to New Hampshire with the second highest intra-party support in these seven decades.

More relevant are the three presidents in this period who were re-nominated but not re-elected: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. These three also had lower primary season approval ratings within their parties than Trump has now, but the difference is much less dramatic, with all three pulling at least two-thirds support.

Ford, Carter, and Bush the elder were the only sitting presidents in those 70 years to lose a general election, and they were also the only three nominees to be seriously primaried. As Perry Bacon Jr. and Dhrumil Mehta note at FiveThirtyEight, there are two possible explanations: "It's not totally clear which way the causation runs here — did the primary challenge weaken Ford, Carter, and H.W. Bush ahead of the general election, or was it simply a symptom of a weakness that already existed?"

Bacon and Mehta argue for the latter, and they're probably correct. But there's no reason to think this is an either/or proposition. Trump is and likely will remain more popular within his own party than these three presidents were, but a credible primary challenger could still do real damage to his general election chances.

A president who can cruise through primary season unchallenged is a president who can conserve his war chest for the main event. He is spared the scrutiny of primary debates, freed to launch broadsides across the aisle while his potential opponents must battle among themselves. He can avoid reminding his own party's voters that there are actually things — maybe a lot of things — they don't like about him, policy positions or personal failings another candidate might not have. He can stick to a single strategy and message for all 7 billion months of our endless campaign season, jumping straight to a focus on the general election instead of doing the post-primary pivot.

A President Trump who doesn't have a serious primary challenger has it easy.

Yet a lot hinges on one word: serious. For a primary challenger to have a real effect on Trump's general election standing, he or she would have to mount an impressive campaign even while knowing it is, in the immediate sense, all for naught — and very possibly the end of this person's political career. This would require a strong fundraising operation and the established name recognition of a Mitt Romney, John Kasich, or maybe Jeff Flake.

Romney and Kasich in particular are among the few it is possible to imagine having the history and clout in the GOP to insist Trump be compelled to participate in primary debates. That seems much less likely with Bill Weld, the one potential primary challenger to officially announce his exploratory committee to date. Weld is a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, but he also campaigned for vice president with the Libertarian Party in 2016, bizarrely seeming more enthusiastic about the candidacy of Hillary Clinton than that of his own running mate.

So Weld is probably not the challenger to get Trump to the debate stage and busy him during primary season, but someone else could do it. They would be in for a terrible slog marked by juvenile name-calling and one defeat after another. They would not become president, and they might never hold any elected office again. They could even play a role in helping elect a Democratic candidate whose administration they would find nearly or equally as objectionable as Trump's.

But if the aim is to get Donald J. Trump out of the White House, a serious primary challenger may be just the ticket.

If you want to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to give up his nukes, ixnay on the regime change talk already. So warned Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), a 2020 presidential candidate, on Twitter Tuesday morning:

North Korea will look at Trump's actions, not empty promises. We can't expect Kim to believe that we won't overthrow him if he gives up his nukes, when he sees us threaten to carry out regime-change war in Iran and Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/GcDkjBMV3w

The connection between North Korea and the fate of two nations half a world away may seem slim, but Pyongyang has pointed to past U.S.-orchestrated regime changes in similarly distant Iraq and Libya as reasons not to denuclearize.

Neither Iraq's Saddam Hussein or Libya's Moammar Gadhafi could "escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations of nuclear development and giving up undeclared programs of their own accord," North Korean state-run media has argued, concluding that "[h]istory proves that powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasure sword for frustrating outsiders' aggression."

Kim meets with President Trump in Vietnam this week for their second summit to negotiate denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula.

The House of Representatives voted 248-177 earlier this month to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition intervening in Yemen's civil war — but the bill won't get a vote in the Senate.

House Republicans added an amendment to the legislation condemning anti-Semitism, and the Senate's parliamentarian this week determined the addition is not germane to the broader content of the bill. That determination is thought to be the basis for removing the bill's "privileged" status, which would have guaranteed it a vote on the Senate floor.

Now that the legislation has been "de-privileged," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) can decline to bring the measure to a vote.

"We will reintroduce the clean version that we passed in the Senate last year and send it back to the House for a vote," said a representative from the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is sponsoring the bill with Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).

Even with a clean version, obstacles would remain. House Republicans could introduce the same amendment again, which would put House Democrats and the minority of House Republicans who backed the bill in the unfortunate position of having to vote against condemning anti-Semitism to keep the legislation viable. And President Trump has threatened to veto the bill if it arrives at his desk.

Americans are worried major tech companies are misusing their digital data — but not enough to do much about it.

Survey results released Monday by IBM's Institute for Business Value found strong majorities of consumers say they have become more worried about how their data is used (81 percent); would like to see more transparency from (89 percent) and regulation of (87 percent) tech giants; and are less trusting of big tech companies than they used to be (75 percent).

But few are willing to change their personal habits to protect their own privacy. Only 16 percent have stopped using a service in response to data misuse. Just 45 percent bother to adjust their account privacy settings. And 71 percent say privacy sacrifices are worth it for the benefits big tech can offer.

To paraphrase Patrick Henry, give me privacy or give me — wait, this targeted ad is actually exactly the kind of sneaker I want to buy.

The 2020 election is still more than a year and a half away, but President Trump's re-election campaign has been raking in record-setting sums for months. Trump is also spending a lot of that money already, dropping $23 million in the last quarter of 2018 alone.

Many of those expenditures were focused on Republican candidates on the ballot in 2018, with about $8 million going to online and TV advertising and $1.5 million spent on Trump's beloved campaign rallies. The president's campaign also owes the U.S. Treasury about $1 million for travel expenses, and it's spending hundreds of thousands on legal services and campaign consultants. "Make America Great Again" hats are a significant cost too, running the campaign $289,000 in the final three months of last year.

Most of Trump's campaign funding comes from small contributions, but major donors matter too — and they're reportedly getting nervous there's no strategy behind all this spending.

A recent meeting with more than 100 big contributors and Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, left the donors unsatisfied Trump has a viable plan for re-election, Politicoreported Monday. "There's a lot of anxiety," one such donor, who is also a friend of the president, told Politico. "There isn't a lot of confidence ... among the donor group, the broader Republican group important to the reelection."

"Donors are asking for the plan and they have no plan," said an independent adviser with ties to the campaign. "There's not a strategy." And even if there is a strategy, another donor mused, there is no guarantee Trump can stick to it: "The problem is the president can't and won't stay on message, push an issue in any kind of sustained way, stay out of trouble for more than five minutes."

An open letter from 23 former GOP lawmakers published Monday urges Republicans currently in Congress to block President Trump's national emergency, which he declared earlier this month to obtain funding for border wall construction.

With signatories including former Defense Secretary and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), the letter "offer[s] two arguments against allowing a president — any president, regardless of party — to circumvent congressional authority." One is the Constitution's investiture of lawmaking power, including the power of the purse, in Congress, not the presidency. To permit the president to usurp that authority, the letter says, is to undermine "true representative government."

The second argument appeals to its readers' self-interest as much as to principles of good governance, warning that Trump's emergency declaration will backfire for the very Republicans who support it now.

"[W]hat will you do when a president of another party uses the precedent you are establishing to impose policies to which you are unalterably opposed?" the letter asks. "There is no way around this difficulty: What powers are ceded to a president whose policies you support may also be used by presidents whose policies you abhor."

The letter closes with an appeal to oppose Trump's declaration; a vote is scheduled in the House on Tuesday and the Senate is expected to take up the issue soon. Trump, meanwhile, issued an opposite plea on Twitter Monday, telling GOP senators to be "strong and smart" and "don't get led down the path of weak and ineffective Border Security."

I found out I am having twins in perhaps the most gradual way it is possible to learn there are two strangers growing inside you.

After my husband and I decided to have children, I signed up as a patient with a lovely, midwife-managed birth center just two miles from my home. I called the midwives when I got a positive pregnancy test, and I called the midwives when — home alone and panicking on a Sunday night — I worried I was having a miscarriage.

They decided it would be wise to come in for a pair of blood tests to confirm I was still pregnant. If my levels of a hormone called hCG rose from one test to the next, it would be a strong indication all was well. But before I could take the second test, the results of the first came in, and my hCG levels were high. Very, very high.

"There are a few things that could be happening here," the midwife told me over the phone. "It could be you just have high hormone levels. But it could also be an ectopic pregnancy, or it could be twins." An ectopic pregnancy is when the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, typically in a fallopian tube. It's always nonviable, can cause life-threatening hemorrhaging, and may be treated with surgery, depending on how far growth has progressed.

So maybe I was going to die, maybe my hormones were just being a little weird, or maybe it was twins!

We scheduled an early ultrasound to sort things out, and a few days later I watched as a shape like owl eyes appeared among the unintelligible gray static that is apparently my innards. In the eyes, two fuzzy white pupils, each with its own heart beat zipping along at 176 beats per minute. Two yolk sacs, two placentas, two babies. Twins.

From that moment of discovery, two parallel stories of having twins began to emerge.

One is a tale of excitement. Everyone is excited about twins. Even people who don't care about babies get a pang of interest when there are two of them. Relatives paw through the family tree to shake out stories of twins past (fraternal twins like mine can run in families, and it turns out I have twin cousins on both sides). One relative told me she was jealous of my twins because she always wanted to be a twin herself. Another literally screamed at the news. A third was sure we were joking, glancing around the room for confirmation the slip of ultrasound paper she held was not, in fact, an elaborate prank.

The other story is one frustration. That lovely birth center? I can't go there anymore. When we assumed there was just one baby, I may have been the lowest risk patient on their roster — "You really have no medical history, huh?" one midwife observed as she went through my file — but with twins, I was immediately shunted into the high risk category.

At first I assumed the ban on twin deliveries was unique to this facility. Other birth centers would be less convenient, a little farther from my house, but I resigned myself to switch. Instead, I got rejections everywhere I inquired. Finally, one birth center volunteered information that made me realize exactly how different this pregnancy would be from what I'd anticipated. "We can provide prenatal care for twins," the center's manager explained, "but unfortunately, due to our accreditation in Minnesota, twin births cannot take place in a birth center."

It wasn't just my birth center. No birth center would help me give birth.

All my plans and preparation whipped out the window. In their place, a choice between two extremes: home birth with one of the few local midwives who would attend a twin delivery, an arrangement that would not be covered by my insurance and could devolve into a surprise trip to the hospital — or a planned hospital birth, where I'd likely be pushed to preemptively schedule a cesarean section, and even a vaginal delivery would take place in the operating room, a prospect that gives me visions of protesting to scalpel-wielding surgeons that it's still too soon to cut.

My imagination may be running a little wild there, but not by much. The last century has seen birth in the United States become an increasingly over-medicalized process, with labor treated much like an illness to be cured in as little time as possible.

Where once American women overwhelmingly delivered in their own homes, attended by midwives, today 98 percent give birth in a hospital setting. The World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded there is "no justification for any region to have a caesarean section rate higher than 10-15 percent," but the American cesarean rate is more than twice that: As of 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, 32 percent of babies delivered in the United States are born by c-section.

Of course, there are times when a c-section is medically necessary, and some births simply will not be safe for mother and baby (or babies) alike without the resources only a hospital can offer. I regularly tell my husband how happy I am to have modern conveniences that make my life historically safe and easy: the internet, the washing machine, and my beloved robot vacuum have all inspired such declarations. As an expectant mother I thankfully add medical advances to that list.

The trouble with the way birth is handled in America is not the use of these medical resources but their misuse and overuse.

Consider that 32 percent c-section rate. Why is it so high? A few women do request elective c-sections, following in the footsteps of celebrities who have thus scheduled their deliveries to avoid "surprises" or pain. But national survey data suggests mother-initiated elective c-sections are extremely rare among the non-celebrity population. Moms are not the ones driving this shift.

The culprit rather is an effort by medical providers and insurance companies to make birth quick, predictable, scheduled, and safe — from litigation at least as much as from actual physical danger. "The medical-legal climate on labor floors became such that many doctors no longer went out of their way to convince a woman to have a vaginal delivery, particularly if she had a c-section in the past," says Dr. Peter Bernstein, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the Bronx's Montefiore Medical Center.

Today about one in four women in America with low-risk pregnancies and full-term, singleton babies in position for a normal vaginal delivery will undergo a cesarean, and the greatest determining factor of whether an expectant mother will have a c-section is not her choice or the risks of her pregnancy, but where she seeks maternity care. In some hospitals, the c-section rate for low-risk pregnancies is as high as 70 percent.

For many women, the path to c-section involves an escalating cycle of medical intervention. It often begins with induction, in which labor is hastened or even forced though the use of medication, rupturing the amniotic sac (when this happens of its own accord, it's called your water breaking), or even inserting a gradually inflating balloon into the cervix to help soften it for delivery.

Inductions happen for lots of different reasons. Some are planned because the pregnancy has passed 42 weeks, at which point the placenta begins to degrade and the baby may become quite large. Others may address more unusual medical conditions, as in this account from a mother scheduled for induction at 34 weeks so she can safely proceed with cancer treatment.

But inductions also happen as a matter of logistical convenience — "such as living far away from the hospital," notes a guide from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — or because labor is judged to be moving too slowly. Drugs like Pitocin are used to increase the rate and strength of contractions, which in turn can make the pain of delivery significantly more intense than it otherwise would be. Pain relief, most notably an epidural, quickly becomes necessary. But the pain medicine can act to slow labor, which necessitates more Pitocin, which means more pain, which means more epidural.

"The result is a labor that is more difficult to manage," explains Dr. Judith A. Lothian in The Journal of Perinatal Education, as "the uterine muscle never totally relaxes between contractions, increasing stress on both the uterus and the baby." Soon, an emergency cesarean may be required to deal with emerging complications, like the fetal heart rate beginning to drop.

After delivery, induced labor is correlated with additional complications, including a greater need for NICU care for infants. Birth without the normal release of hormones like oxytocin, which occurs in spontaneous labor, can also correlate with difficulty in breastfeeding and mother-child bonding, as well as an increased risk of postpartum depression. A c-section is a major surgery that requires substantial recovery time and makes future births more complicated. Epidurals can also have long-term side effects, even permanent nerve damage.

"Step by step, one intervention leads to a series of interventions, and the net result is the mother finally ends up with a cesarean, and everybody says, 'Thank God we were able to do all these interventions to save your baby,'" says Dr. Eugene Declercq, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University's School of Medicine. "The fact of the matter is if they didn't start the cascade of interventions, none of that would have been necessary."

Declercq made his comments in The Business of Being Born, a 2008 documentary on the evolution and current state of birth care in the United States. Business makes a compelling case that most American maternity care is thoroughly dysfunctional, operating on perverse incentives and sticking mothers with high bills and birth experiences more traumatic and riskier than they need to be. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, and it's climbing while rates in comparable nations drop. Our neonatal mortality rate, defined as infant deaths within 28 days of birth, is similarly high.

It would be irresponsible to attribute these differences to a single cause, but it is indefensible to ignore conspicuous contributing factors, like how births in these comparable nations tend to proceed with fewer and less invasive interventions; frequently take place outside of the hospital in home or birth center settings; and are often attended by midwives rather than surgeons.

The last decade has seen a renewed interest in less medicalized birth options, fueled by awareness projects like Business, the high monetary price of an intervention-heavy delivery, and even the popularity of the BBC's Call the Midwife (which I have been binging of late as a sort of DIY exposure therapy). A small but growing subset of America's expectant mothers are exploring their options for non-hospital deliveries, and many medical professionals, too, are working to lower c-section rates.

Unless it's twins.

When there's a second baby, all the troubling over-medicalization trends we see in singleton births are multiplied. Fully 75 percent of twin births in America are cesareans, more than double the 32 percent average. If one or more of the babies is breech, that rate jumps to 92 percent. (It is not unusual for one twin to present head up at the start of delivery and the other head down, though in a vaginal birth, the breech twin may flip or be moved into a normal, head-down position after the first twin is delivered.)

Some disparity between the intervention rate for twins and singletons is to be expected. Two babies are riskier than one (as are three or four, though higher order multiples births are so rare that comprehensive statistics are few). But there is good reason to believe that just as with single births, the frequency and degree of interventions in twin births in America has increased well past what is medically necessary.

As recently as 1995, the twin c-section rate was 53 percent. Between 1995 and 2008, that rate increased by about 5 percent every single year. Just like the broader spike in c-section use in the United States, this shift is not attributable to safety.

A landmark 2013 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found planned cesarean sections for twin deliveries were no safer than planned vaginal births. "Studies have suggested that maybe cesarean delivery is the best way, but there's no evidence to support the swing to cesarean birth," says Dr. Jon Barrett, head of the high-risk obstetrics team at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, Canada, and the 2013 study's lead author.

Twin pregnancies have become more common in recent decades thanks to rising use of fertility treatments and higher average maternal age, but because the "pendulum has swung too far to cesarean," Barrett says, "now we may not have enough skilled practitioners to do these more difficult vaginal births." OB/GYNs may enter practice having never observed or performed a spontaneous vaginal twin delivery, let alone developed the expertise to approach the situation with confidence. Planned cesareans skirt that problem — but they also introduce a hydra of other hazards.

For expectant mothers of twins, Barrett casts his study results as a guidepost to informed deliveries whose methods aren't determined by unnecessary fear. "Realize that you have a choice and find a [birth] center or an obstetrician who is willing to [honor] your choice," he says. "If they can't offer vaginal delivery in their hospital, they should refer you to a center that can, rather than just diverting you to a cesarean delivery."

This is what I have tried to do, though the "no twins in the birth centers" rule has proven a serious obstacle. (Aly Folin, president of the Minnesota Council of Certified Professional Midwives, explained this ban comes not from state law but the Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers, a national accrediting organization which requires freestanding birth centers to transfer all expectant mothers of multiples to hospital care.)

Though I might have chosen it for a singleton birth, I opted against home delivery for twins. I'm not worried about the home aspect of it, but that if I did require a transfer to hospital, I'd have little to no control over where and under whose care I'd land. An unplanned trip to a local hospital during twin delivery all but ensures my births would become part of that 75 percent c-section statistic.

Instead, on a recommendation from that original birth center, I'm working with an obstetrician in the next state over. My twins will technically be native Wisconsinites, assuming all goes as planned, because the 45-minute drive from the Twin Cities is worth it to me to see a doctor who specializes in successful vaginal deliveries for twins, even with breech presentations. He works in a small hospital that has fashioned itself into something of a destination for mothers like me, offering a birth center-like environment — averse to unnecessary interventions and happy to operate on whatever pace natural labor sets — within hospital walls.

The distance aside, I'm lucky to have this option, but too many of America's growing population of mothers of twins will not be so fortunate. Their pregnancy experience will be one of over-hyped risk and ever-narrowing options, leading inexorably to the surgeon's table for three in every four. It doesn't have to be that way.

93% Approval Rating in the Republican Party. 52% Approval Rating overall! Not bad considering I get the most unfair (BAD) press in the history of presidential politics! And don’t forget the Witch Hunt!

He was apparently referring to a Rasmussen Reports poll from Feb. 11 which did indeed put the president's approval rating at 52 percent. Since then, however, nine subsequent Rasmussen polls have seen it drop back to 49 percent, and the RealClearPoliticsaverage of nine separate surveys — including polls from Rasmussen and Fox News — puts Trump's approval at just 44 percent, with 53 percent disapproval.

Looking ahead to 2020, measuring presidential approval at the state level may be the more profitable exercise. Gallup poll results published Friday show Trump has an approval rating of 50 percent or higher in 17 states, which together have just 102 of 538 Electoral College votes:

The 17 states where Trump's approval meets or exceeds 50% account for a combined total of 102 electoral votes. In contrast, the states in which Trump has an approval rating below 40% account for 201 electoral votes. https://t.co/bcXeMLm0fTpic.twitter.com/B3OECgqNd3

When Vice President Mike Pence in Germany and Poland this month urged European leaders to follow the United States' example in abandoning the Iran nuclear deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly was not happy.

Pence's bombastic comments shattered a "fragile unity" Pompeo had cobbled together for talks about Iran with U.S. allies, The New York Timesreported Sunday in a lengthy new profile of Pompeo's tenure at state. Publicly, the secretary kept silent. But behind closed doors, the Times story says, he raged at Pence's untimely message:

Privately, Mr. Pompeo briefly erupted. Aides said he complained Mr. Pence had undermined diplomacy — which one European official said included near-agreement about imposing new sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile tests — and prompted fresh headlines about trans-Atlantic tensions. [The New York Times]

The episode is emblematic of the Times' broader portrayal of Pompeo as carefully loyal to the White House when in the public eye, a tactic that has kept the secretary of state in President Trump's volatile favor:

Mr. Pompeo unfailingly sticks to the presidential line. For example, he publicly refuses to acknowledge the intelligence agencies' assessments — including those prepared by his former staff at the C.I.A. — that contradict Mr. Trump on matters like North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic State.

The president has rewarded Mr. Pompeo's loyalty by anointing him the point person on several signature issues. Those include North Korea and Afghanistan, a subject on which one American official said Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Trump speak directly to each other, sidelining [National Security Adviser John] Bolton. [The New York Times]

President Trump in a series of tweets Sunday touted his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of their summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, this coming week. Trump also reiterated his Friday enthusiasm for progress in trade talks with Beijing, thanked Russia and China for their support in dealing with North Korea, and praised Kim's political savvy:

Very productive talks yesterday with China on Trade. Will continue today! I will be leaving for Hanoi, Vietnam, early tomorrow for a Summit with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, where we both expect a continuation of the progress made at first Summit in Singapore. Denuclearization?

President Xi of China has been very helpful in his support of my meeting with Kim Jong Un. The last thing China wants are large scale nuclear weapons right next door. Sanctions placed on the border by China and Russia have been very helpful. Great relationship with Chairman Kim!

Chairman Kim realizes, perhaps better than anyone else, that without nuclear weapons, his country could fast become one of the great economic powers anywhere in the World. Because of its location and people (and him), it has more potential for rapid growth than any other nation!

Meanwhile, Kim left Pyongyang by train on Saturday for a multi-day journey across China to Vietnam. The trip was confirmed by North Korean state media, which also said Kim is accompanied by his sister, Kim Yo Jong, senior North Korean negotiator Kim Yong Chol, and Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, among others.

President Trump on Twitter early Sunday announced his plans for a big Independence Day party in Washington this year, pledging a personal appearance and preemptively declaring the event one of the city's largest gatherings ever:

HOLD THE DATE! We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C., on July 4th. It will be called “A Salute To America” and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!

The one truly new element of Trump's plans appears to be his own speech. Washington already has annual fireworks displays for the Fourth of July, as well as entertainment including the National Independence Day Parade and "A Capitol Fourth," an outdoor concert with performances from military bands, celebrities, the National Symphony Orchestra.

A Chicago judge set R&B singer R. Kelly's bond at $1 million Saturday, $250,000 for each of the four victims he is alleged to have sexually abused. He will have to post $100,000 bail to be released ahead of trial.

Kelly has been charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, and three of the four victims were under 18 when the alleged abuse occurred. One of them supplied investigators with a shirt she wore during an interaction with Kelly, prosecutors said in court Saturday, and the clothing tested positive for his DNA.

Kelly has denied all accusations, and his attorney, Steve Greenberg, told reporters Saturday the singer "doesn't have to have nonconsensual sex" because he is "a rock star."

Greenberg also said Kelly hoped to post bail by Saturday evening. Kelly was ultimately unable to assemble the funds and spent a second night in jail.

Construction was completed in October of 2017 on eight wall prototypes at the border near San Diego. President Trump looked at the sample walls the following March, and now they will all be torn down.

Each prototype cost between $300,000 and $500,000, for a total bill of $2.4 to $4 million. Additional expenditures will be required to remove them now that their brief show-and-tell purpose is finished.

"There is money already allocated to either take them down or build infrastructure around them," Border Patrol Agent Theron Francisco said Friday. "But the decision has been made at the national level to take them down, and the secondary replacement project will take their place." The timeline for the prototypes' destruction has yet to be set.

Earlier this month, Trump declared a national emergency to help obtain the billions he seeks for further border wall construction, but it is already facing legal challenge which could delay or permanently block Trump's plan from moving forward.

A group of nearly 100 Microsoft workers signed a petition Friday calling on their employer to cancel a $480 million contract with the U.S. Army and to stop developing "any and all weapons technologies."

Microsoft has agreed to sell the military its HoloLens headset, which allows users to see a virtually augmented version of reality. Contract bidding documents indicate the Army intends to use the gear as part of its Integrated Visual Augmentation System for both training and battlefield situations to improve soldiers' "lethality, mobility, and situational awareness."

"We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used," says the employee petition, arguing that when the HoloLens headset is "deployed on the battlefield," it will turn "warfare into a simulated 'video game,' further distancing soldiers from the grim stakes of war and the reality of bloodshed."

In a response statement Friday, Microsoft said it appreciated workers' input but will continue working with the military.

A similar intra-company conflict at Google last year over technology used for drone strikes resulted in the resignation of about a dozen employees and protest from some 4,600 more. Google ultimately did not renew the defense contract at issue, saying it clashed with company values.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un fully expects his children to join the family dictatorship business someday, and when that happens, he reportedly does not want them to be burdened with a nuclear arsenal.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "asked Chairman Kim: Do you really intend to denuclearize?" former CIA official Andrew Kim said of a meeting between Kim and Pompeo last year. "You know, I'm a father, and I'm a husband, and I have children, and I don't want my children to carry the nuclear weapon in their bag to live through their entire life," Andrew Kim reported Kim Jong Un replied.

The question of the Kim regime's sincerity in its denuclearization pledges is much debated, especially given reports of secret missile test sites. Pyongyang has explicitly pointed to the fates of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi as cautionary tales of voluntary denuclearization leading to forcible, U.S.-orchestrated regime change.